[zn44]

The startup is still going 5 years in. We had great run intially up to raising series A in 2019. Then covid hit us hard we had to lay off most of the team. We are growing slowly again but not quite out of the pit

Now one of my co-foundes pushed out other one last year and now is quitting himself with most of his equity vested.

At many points in the last few years my decisions to stay in the business were much harder because of unbalanced equity. Running a business is hard, hardest thing I've ever done. Last thing you want is feeling someone is going to profit from your effort and you get nothing from it, it's especially risky with your setup because your VC friends might eventually get pref shares. And don't count on your personal relationship with them, end of the day they are running business and have obligations to their investors

Finally raising seed money is not the success, building product people want with supportive business model is, running 18 months with your seed money and failing anyway doesn't sound much better than 18 without investment. I don't have that much experience in investing but I'd also think that cap table like this would make getting more money from other investors hard