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Hire your co-founder. Give them a large sum of equity. Vested over 4 years. Truly treat them like a co-founder. If you do decide to go down the 50/50 route, please at least consider: Make sure you have foundervesting for both of you. If you ever fall out of love you have a pre-nuptial agreement.
Typically, vesting in startups occurs monthly over four years, starting with the first 25 percent of shares vesting only after an owner has remained active for at least 12 months (one year cliff ). Key foundervesting should have no cliff. Accelerate your own vesting if pushed out or the startup is acquired.
Finance Friday’s gets off the ground with today’s post by introducing you to an imaginary startup, the entrepreneurs that we’ll being following throughout the series, and their first challenges: splitting up the founders’ equity and addressing the case where one of the founders provides the initial seed capital for the business.
Typically, vesting in startups occurs monthly over four years, starting with the first 25 percent of shares vesting only after an owner has remained active for at least 12 months (one year cliff ). Key foundervesting should have no cliff. Accelerate your own vesting if pushed out or the startup is acquired.
I’ll offer that both entrepreneurs and VC’s have the wrong model for founding CEO equity compensation. The customary vesting model has foundersvest their stock over 4-years , and when the founding CEO gets in over their head the VC’s bring in professional management.
FounderVesting [Jared Hecht/USV] – Jared joined USV earlier this year and it’ll be interesting to see how his writing changes as he adds ‘institutional VC’ to his founder and angel investor knowledge. Stretching things out to a six-year vest helps to prevent co-founder abandonment.
I’ve probably had a thousand or more discussions about startup equity: figuring out how much to offer, negotiating, or advising others. In practice, most equity grants within a company are driven by broad calibrations with existing employees. For example, if four co-founders agree to equal equity, they each own 25% at the very outset.
Typically, vesting in startups occurs monthly over four years, starting with the first 25 percent of shares vesting only after an owner has remained active for at least 12 months (one year cliff ). Key foundervesting should have no cliff. Accelerate your own vesting if pushed out or the startup is acquired.
We couldn’t use them as is because they don’t have enough detail on key items, like investor protections and foundervesting. Since writing that termsheet we have used it on around four deals and shared it with a few more companies we have had discussions with.
We couldn’t use them as is because they don’t have enough detail on key items, like investor protections and foundervesting. Since writing that termsheet we have used it on around four deals and shared it with a few more companies we have had discussions with.
2. You need (or think you need) a stock option plan: granting stock options (and other forms of equity compensation to employees like restricted stock) should be done under a written equity incentive plan. You might be doing a convertible debt round or an equity round. The convertible debt round will take less legal time.
Breakups are hard If you’re going to fall out with your co-founder, do it early, recover the equity into the option pool to keep the company going, and recruit someone else great to fill the missing slot. Build in foundervesting (a.k.a. the “Pre-Nup&# ) to keep the breakup from getting messy.
The only solution in such a scenario is to negotiate a repurchase of those shares, which could be very expensive or impossible (if the departing founder wants to screw with his co-founders). IP Ownership.
One of these norms is how foundervesting and employee vesting works. I won’t get into employee vesting today as that has much more to consider than I have time to cover in this short post today. Here is a good summary post from Cooley GO on FounderVesting. The first is fairly obvious.
The Equity Equation. As this nuclear winter of venture hacks continues, I thought you might enjoy our thoughts on Paul Graham’s The Equity Equation. ” Read the rest of The Equity Equation first; it is great. You have to pay market rates regardless of the equity equation. Venture Hacks Good advice for startups.
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