

Consulting Cofounder - quinten

I'm planning to start a startup with a cofounder in January. However, he's considering a consulting offer from his current company: 8h/week + fly abroad to their HQ every 2 months for 8 12+ hour days (excl. travel time of 12h + jetlag), all while working on our own startup. He's citing as pros: money for our startup ($2500+/month) + contacts + we get to keep the stuff he develops + the company is working on interesting stuff. I'm weighing the pros and cons, but I'm gravitating towards 'no': it takes too much time, it will be a distraction, and it's unsettling that he'll have responsiblities to another company than our own. What do you guys think?
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jacobscott
If you total up those hours, you're getting 160 hrs per 2 months = ~20 hours a
week. So

a) that's a pretty large time investment

b) $2500/mo for 80 hours of consulting is pretty poor pay -- $30 an hour?!
That's $60k/yr with no benefits...

Seems like a pretty poor deal to me.

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quinten
I was netting it after taxes, the deal is about $50/hour. Plus his options
keep on vesting.

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brk
Given the lack of other data (what would be his role in your startup, how good
is he at multitaskig, what are you building, how much time will it take, can
you augment his absence with another person, is this Forever or For a While),
it's really hard to make any good recommendations.

Some people will tell you they did this and it worked out fine, others will
tell you it was the cause of their demise.

I don't mean to attack your question, it just seems that you're asking for an
answer to a multi-variable problem, and you've only given 1 constant.

Also, what would happen to that $2500? Is it to pay his bills, or fund your
venture?

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quinten
The money would be completely for the startup. Of course there are many
variables to consider in this dilemma, but I didn't want to make the post too
long.

As for our roles in the startup, he is a web developer, I'm a
mathematician/developer, so we complement each other. Just the two of us, at
least for the coming couple of months. The idea that I'm getting, already in
this phase of preparing for the startup, is this: in a startup, there's always
work to be done and you get bonus points if you iterate fast. So that kind of
mitigates the factor if somebody is a good multitasker or not (I'm more of a
believer in focus).

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ram1024
completely depends on your roles in this startup and what you're planning to
make,

it's going to be one of those things where you have to decide what's best on
your own, because you are the one with insight as to what needs to happen.

