Dump the word founder. If it takes seven years to build a company, then after seven years any employee is also a founder and should have equal share.
Please use the reply link, oh, wandering downmodders.
Please use the reply link, oh, wandering downmodders.
There have been a number of recent posts moving in this direction, where prominent investors have argued that the line between founder and early employee is blurrier than most people think it is, and so employees should get more equity than they currently do, with fewer restrictions. See eg:
http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity
http://blog.detour.com/introducing-progressive-equity/
The current founder/employee divide is largely a relic of the days where, to build a tech startup, first you had to convince a bunch of investors to give you $10M and then you hired a team with that. In that system, the founders were the ones who convinced the investors, and the employees were the ones who were hired with investor money.
But capital requirements for startups have gone way down since then. Now, the logical divide is before vs. after product/market fit. If you join BPMF, you're a founder - sometimes (oftentimes?) the title and equity don't go along with that, but that's because there are a lot of suckers out there who don't actually know how the startup game works. If you join APMF, you're an employee. After all, a founder's entire job is to identify an unmet need in the marketplace and devise a strategy for solving it, and until you get PMF you haven't really done that.
The complication is that startups BPMF shouldn't be hiring at all, but few of them realize that, and even fewer of them can check their egos enough to realize that having people do your bidding won't actually help you find a viable business model faster, it just makes pivoting more difficult. There've been tweets from Sam Altman [1], comments from Paul Buchheit [2], essays from Paul Graham [3 - "If you went out and hired 15 people before you even knew what you were building, you've created a broken company."], and video interviews with Marc Andreesen that all say that, but still, a seemingly large fraction of entrepreneurs don't listen.
[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/667852581968805888
I think the fallacy that is committed in any alternative scheme is assuming a fixed value for each individual for the life of the company.
Why not just set the bar right to begin with: everyone contributes as much value as they can, and we all share it. Consider an alternative: everyone contributes as much value as they can, but the dude who put in $5 20 years ago and doesn't even show up any more gets 10,000 more parts of every $1 I produce today.
>The complication is that startups BPMF shouldn't be hiring at all, but few of them realize that
It is curious that you state this as if there are BPMF startups. How does such a thing happen? A BPMF startup sounds more like a research center.