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Comment by 20yrs_no_equity | Hacker News Reader

You admit you have a main founder. Does this main founder have sorta ultimate authority? Or does he hold the singular original vision from which everyone else's vision/mission/purpose comes from?

What's the equity split like among the 6 of you?

What created that base of trust you describe? Was it everyone agreeing to follow the "main founders" vision, and him being respectful and not ego driven (so that the vision became shared?)

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> Was it everyone agreeing to follow the "main founders" vision, and him being respectful and not ego driven (so that the vision became shared?)

Pretty much exactly that plus providing the seed round. In practice, this also definitely had a lot to do with things working out well to have a center piece that's stable, predictable and a little detached, quite the opposite of a show-off. Buying into a main vision and then transferring it into a vision for tech, marketing, sales, product and operations was much easier that way.

Equity split was 50:others by the way.

Now you might argue this isn't a "real" as in "more equal" cofounder dynamic, but giving away 50% of your company before even starting and then treating those people as equals made a lot of difference, including an enormous buy-in at all key builders of the company. After having experienced how well it played out, I'd do it the same way.

What's the salary dispersion among the founders? It sounds like you've solved one of the main issues that prevents good people from leaving their stable jobs to found startups, which is providing actually meaningful equity to a base of qualified and capable people instead of hoarding it between 1-2 founders and investors, leaving only fractions of a percent for the earliest employees.

I'm curious if you also cleared the other huge hurdle: giving up 70% of individual earning power for what is essentially a lottery ticket.

Personally, I think the buck has to stop somewhere, and it's more important to be united in a vision than to be right, or to be struggling for what's right. At the same time, it doesn't work when the person with whome the buck stops is authoritarian. I respect someone who is wrong who at least has a reason for being wrong based on their perspective of the situation. But I can't abide someone who is wrong and who forces the startup to do the wrong thing because they have the authority of position. I find those people are not going to be predictable in the mistakes they make, and more importantly the will not recover from them.

I asked the questions because I think you might be onto something, a way to split things up and have genuine founders without the "everyone gets 1/n of the equity" equality that leads to strife.

Him putting in the seed round and other contributions necessary to give him the weight that makes it a valuable deal for everyone also seems to be a key element in your situation.

Thanks for sharing!

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