| You have three options: 1. Legal 2. Financial 3. Personal Relationships Unless you are also a founder with a significant stake, you probably only have option #3. First, you have to know the legal ownership structure of the company. If the founder owns majority control of the company, there's not a lot you can do on the legal side. Second, you need to know where the money is coming from. If it's all from investors, you might have a little leverage but not much. If you all go to the investors and say you all want to kick out the founder, lots of bad things could happen. The investor could get scared and pull out (especially if they mainly have a relationship with the founder). The investor might side with you but still not have a way to kick the founder out other than threatening not to invest additional money. Maybe the investor decides the drama isn't worth it and walks away completely. It just depends on the the situation and ownership agreements. Third, you can just go talk to the founder. This is probably your best bet (like others have said). Maybe you can come up with a way to convince the founder that they did a great job of getting you to where you are, but their skills are better spent starting another new company while the team carries on with this phase of growth and development. Tell the founder that they are really good at zero to one, but you need to carry on from here more systematically to be successful. But no matter what seems fair or who did how much work, you probably can't just "kick out" the founder. You'd do best to figure out how to make a deal where everyone hopefully comes out reasonably happy and the founder can save face. If that doesn't work, all you could really do is quit en masse and go start something else without the founder. |