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so are you more concerned that he's not dropping out of school and moving to the US, or that he's not putting up any money?

i can see both points of view, but it does kind of sound like you're asking a lot of him. from what you've written, he's created your core IP so he's put in his share of work (vs your money) and simply wants more than $10k from your brother in the bank before he drops out of school and moves to another country to work with you.

is his staying in europe really that big of a deal to your customers and investors? it sounds like he'd be willing to come over as soon as there's some serious funding available, or after he finishes school.

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Honestly, I don't care so much about him staying in Europe as I do him going full-time.

In terms of the work, yes, he's done most of the programming to date. I've worked with him to design the actual product and had the vision of the core functionality, but yes, he's done the hard part of coding it and what not.

Also, the lead investor we're talking to (who is awesome and an active entrepreneur in our space) currently is an exec in company that has a dev team on the other side of the ocean. Based on his ongoing experience, he thinks the distributed team model sucks and wants our CTO to be here in the US alongside the dev team. I tend to agree with him, as my cofounder and I have had WAY more productive, creative conversation when he was here vs via Skype.

Honestly, if he was willing to give me a firm answer in terms of "when we raise x amt of money, then I'll go full-time," then i'd have no problem. But right now he's being totally vague, and doesn't seem willing to commit to anything specific.

Also, more generally, we've built something very cool, but our product isn't too hard to imitate/copy at this point. We need to kind of sprint to get to the point where network effects kick in, etc. This is also a source of frustration.

ask the CTO cofounder what it would take for him to drop everything and move to US, then either negotiate that or achieve what he's asking for.

from his perspective, he created the core product, and you've put in some initial seed capital and drum up interest. his opportunity cost is very high so he'll need something to balance out the risk..

Doing that now. Not really getting answer.

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