[marcus_holmes]

I've played around with co-operative business structures for this sort of thing, and if the shares are awarded to each employee as a straight split each year (so year 1 creates 100 shares, which are split 50% to the 2 founders, then year 2 creates 100 shares which are split 33% each to 2 founders and 1 employee, and so on) then the founders tend to end up with an outsize lump of shares, and the early employees do well too.

It ends up rewarding early employees more than the normal company structure, but I think that's a good thing; they normally have to go through a lot of disruption (and a fair amount of risk; the chances of the startup not being able to make payroll occasionally are high) and are a key element to the success of the organisation anyway.