[opportune]

How confident are you that your friend will quit their job to work full time on your startup when you start having a moderate (but not huge) amount of success? Will you get there with your friend only giving 1d/week?

If your friend can’t work fulltime on your startup it might be worth hiring them as an employee or contractor with some equity comp to match their commitment to the startup.

If you do go with vesting you may need to set up vesting for yourself to show good faith. But since you’ve already made some progress and are working fulltime on it, it might make sense to agree with your friend on different initial amounts of equity and/or different vesting rates. You may need to ask a professional to figure out how to structure it. I feel like an optimally fair way would be to have your half be structured as vesting over 4y but with you starting with some equity proportionate to the current work you’ve put in, then have your friend’s half vest at a rate conditioned on how much time they can give at any given time such that at fulltime commitment it would vest in 4y (but the so the vesting rate would change if they quit their day job to work on the startup fulltime).

Honestly if I were in your position though I would start with having your friend contract and then bring them in as a founder later if they’re ready to do it fulltime. A lot of people like the idea of working on something like this but lose interest when faced with the reality of grunge work, no immediate success, etc.