| >no one can leave the company high and dry. I would be suspicious that this is the type of thing that this particular capitalist would like to change. They are not your partner, they are your investor. Sounds like your equal partner & you may have a relationship more faithful than the average marriage. Maybe the potential to be more long-lasting too. This can be so rare people don't believe it, or don't know how to deal with it. It can also be unobtainable for the vast majority of business operators, and itself worth more than money. I would stand my ground and constantly work toward equal financial participation total in all forms, you have always been fine with ceding final decision making. And your partner has always been fine with you making the same as him. This should be the ideal structure to go forward. You need to march together in step. Now for those people that you might need to negotiate with in the future, some of whom could be much bigger capitalists, this might limit their ability to offer enough temptation privately to a single individual, intending to leave everyone else in the dark. IOW it might cost them twice as much to accomplish the same thing if the situation comes up. If you think about it, a young startup of college-age founders may not have any assets or revenue, but the relationship among the founders starts out definitely worth more than the entire company (since there is no money at this point), and I would have to estimate the average value today is about $500,000 for the relationship alone if the technology is viable. Simple math says that an unusually outstanding relationship between business partners would be worth twice as much, so now we're up to $1Million. Your technology and ability to execute should be quite a bit better than average. So that's what you bring to the table that makes sense for capitalists to invest comparable funds into the leverage and/or acceleration you have in mind. To maintain that paired momentum, "all you have to do" is everything possible to make sure that the relationship intuitively remains worth more than the entire company from the very beginning, by growing together in value all the way forward from there. Now there may be more hesitation from the greediest of capitalists to invest in the future, but those who do recognize the value of your co-ownership will be rewarded way more than the figures on paper would indicate beforehand. Basically you need to get this behind you and gently but directly iterate that you are like brothers to begin with, everything is based on equal sharing, and might as well treat you guys like brothers just like everyone else does. Tell them it's OK if they want to start calling you Bro-1 & Bro-A if they want to ;) Reassure them there is no Bro-2 or Bro-B, you could have brought your biological brothers in but you didn't. This is their best bet of the kind that doesn't come along every day, there's so many real family businesses raking in the bucks that capitalists will never have a chance to invest in. |