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You are asking about one of my favorites topics (co-founders)...

First of all, understand that he needs to quit. When someone is concerned enough that they post online, it means the situation is bad. So ignore any advice on improving his sales skills.

It's hard to fire your friends (been there, done that). Depending on your relationship, do it nicely, with transitions. Ideally, you want to have a frank discussion where the joint conclusion is that he is not working out and should stop. That's not that hard. If he is genuinely trying to help the business, show him that by getting someone else on board, the business will be better off.

Finally, there is the issue of stocks. Hopefully you had vesting in place. So one way is to go by that agreement. He worked 1 year out of 4, and hopefully you didn't split 50/50. So if you had split originally 66/33 for instance, you'd now be at 88% for you, and less than 12% for him. Which to me is sounds about fair. He did do stuff for a year, right?




Yep - this seems like a good case where vesting would have helped.




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