[paxys]

IMO someone who isn't willing or able to work on the effort full time cannot be a co-founder and equal partner. If your friend wants to start off as a part time employee or consultant then they should be given equity accordingly. Later if/when they want to increase their role in the company you can always give them additional grants.

Being equal partners with someone but contributing five times as much work into the company as them is a recipe for disaster. You may not care all that much right now, but what about when you need to bring on an outside investor and dilute your own stake?

[iancmceachern]

I 100% disagree.

Not everyone has family money to lean on and just quit their jobs.

These people still have value to bring, and in fact most successful startups I know of personally were started by folks as their side job whole working in that particular industry.

A person's value is not how many hours they sit in an office chair a week. A persons value is their output, what soceity is willing to pay for it.

If you find the right value proposition and connect it with the right engineering talent you can get value out of a single hour of that experts time, your don't need 40.

[ericd]

Down that path lies a lot of resentment from the person who is committing their full time and effort. Not a good idea for a partnership.

Surely this hypothetical super-valuable expert earns enough such that they could have saved up some living expenses? That family money thing is, frankly, an excuse that people tell themselves. Lots of people do it without family money.

[iancmceachern]

It's not an excuse that people (me) tell ourselves it's a documented fact:

"There is a strong connection between your parent’s income and your chances of becoming a startup entrepreneur, with those from a strong financial background having a higher chance of becoming entrepreneurs,” said Shira Greenberg, the chief economist Israel’s ministry of finance, in a recent report conducted by his agency and reported by the Jerusalem Post...The study – which used demographic, academic and financial data from Israeli entrepreneurs between the ages of 25 and 35 and their families – found that the income of an entrepreneur’s parents was the most important factor towards the likelihood of starting up a business."

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/20...

Since you poked at me, I'm not telling myself anything. I've had a very deliberate, successful, and thankful career in med tech startups and large companies and as a result have gained some wisdom and had the opportunity to observe how the world works around me, and am now sharing that wisdom and observations made.

[ericd]

That doesn’t seem to say that entrepreneurs rely on family money other than a couple of tired anecdotes about Musk/Gates. It’s mostly saying that successful entrepreneurs tend to come from more successful parents, but I’m pretty sure that’s true of success in most things. Having successful parents tends to help the kids a lot, and the money itself is among the least important ways, imo.

And it wasn’t meant to be directed at you (I’m glad you’ve found success), just that it’s a self-defeating attitude that’s distressingly common. Family money itself is not important when starting something. Though it is helpful to have a couch to fall back on if you need it.

[iancmceachern]

Did you see the study? There is a whole study they did, it's not just the first paragraph or two with the anecdotes, there is meat later in the article that addresses your "plot holes"

Also see this data: "University of California, Berkeley economists Ross Levine and Rona Rubenstein analyzed the shared traits of entrepreneurs in a 2013 paper, and found that most were white, male, and highly educated. “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/entrepr...

[ericd]

Do you have a direct link to the underlying study?

[zen928]

as someone never involved and never interested in being involved with anyone who has a mindset of cuckolding your company with VC interests, agree. my level of commitment isnt related to my level of attention and value to what I work on.

building the toxic association in your head that others have to match your own processes to "prove value" is a stunning display of lacking empathy, in the sense that you aren't looking to understand others motivations by superficially dismissing them to impose your exact working schedule and mental model onto others.

anyone right now with a remote job because of covid that stayed remote because of the perceptible lack of negative impact (showing this same scenario but from the context of upper management) would be a hypocrite to not also disagree with this stance.

[opportune]

It doesn’t need to be family money. Plenty of people have savings for 1y or so of living expenses (or much more) - the thing is, going that route requires a lot of conviction and commitment. You can also raise funding to cover their salary. IMO that commitment is what you want in a cofounder, rather than someone hedging their bets by continuing to work a day job.

If both parties were working day jobs it’d be less of a problem, also slightly less of a people if OP hadn’t invested a lot of their own time already, but I don’t think it makes sense to bring on a cofounder in this case. Compensate their efforts in equity sure, but giving founder level equity to someone investing much less time/risk could cause a lot of problems.

[iancmceachern]

You are right, ot doesn't have to be family money, but in pracrice it most often is:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/20...

[opportune]

yes, for Israeli entrepreneurs between the ages of 25 and 35

[iancmceachern]

Yes, and when we release a new drug we test it on Americans from a certain age range. It doesn't mean that the drug won't work for Canadiens too.

Proof and additional data from Berkeley:

Did you see the study? There is a whole study they did, it's not just the first paragraph or two with the anecdotes, there is meat later in the article that addresses your "plot holes"

Also see this data: "University of California, Berkeley economists Ross Levine and Rona Rubenstein analyzed the shared traits of entrepreneurs in a 2013 paper, and found that most were white, male, and highly educated. “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/entrepr...

[paxys]

All of this is fine, just not for the case where someone is being given controlling stake in a company.