[nostrademons]

It would disqualify nearly all cofounders of famous startups if they had to form the company before one of them made progress on the idea. For example:

Steve Wozniak built the original Apple I attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Steve Jobs saw the prototype, realized it would be huge, and then talked Woz into founding a business around it.

Larry Page had started Google as a doctoral research project to download the web and make sense of its link structure. Sergey's original startup idea was to order pizza via fax machine, and he'd started work on it with some other friends before abandoning it to go work with Larry.

Mark Zuckerburg created FashMash and then Facebook and had some early traction among his house at Harvard before convincing his cofounders to join.

Drew Houston created DropBox as a solo founder and then convinced Arash to join after getting accepted to YC.

Apoorva Mehta started Instacart on his own and then got cofounders after YC.

The usual rule-of-thumb is to give close-to-even equity splits to cofounders here, because most of the work of building a company lies ahead of you, not behind you. You definitely do want to vet your cofounders for trustworthiness and have some idea whether they're interested in founding a company with you or whether they just want your idea. Usually the best defense to the latter is having something the former needs, either deep domain knowledge or technical skills or connections in the industry.

[marincounty]

"Mark Zuckerburg created FashMash and then Facebook and had some early traction among his house at Harvard before convincing his cofounders to join."

I don't think it went down quite like that? I just can't let that little dude slip into history as the brilliant, modern day Jobs, or Gates. In my mind, he capitalized on someone else's idea--with the help of a lot of people, and got very lucky. Whenever I(under a pseudonym) use his site, I wonder why there isn't more competition. I sometimes think the very act of stealing someone's idea/site is the reason for Facebook's success? "I better not question that new hire--I'm not sure I even belong here? I was wrong on mobile? Maybe I should just follow their advice?"

[elmar]

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates also capitalized on someone else's idea. The "idea" is just one factor on a very complex equation.

Take a look at this great movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley

[Tloewald]

Ideas aren't worth much. The real idea that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had was that personal computers and software were compelling products that would have value to ordinary people.

I suggest you read the book "Hackers" by Stephen Levy (aside from probably giving more accurate insight into the origins of Microsoft and Apple, also includes timeshare, Unix, the free software movement, and IIRC Lisp Machines in its recounting, all in a lot less space than Isaacson's complete ballsup).

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-Ann...

[sparkzilla]

>You definitely do want to vet your cofounders for trustworthiness and have some idea whether they're interested in founding a company with you or whether they just want your idea.

This advice would have been handy for the Winkelvoss twins, who hired Zuckerberg to build their social network project. Instead he secretly held their project back while building his own version, including their ideas. The rest, as they say, is his story.

[elmar]

Why not use a vesting scheme.