Ask HN: How much equity to give a new (3rd) cofounder, ~1 year in?
The two of us started working on it full-time about this time a year ago, and are just about at the MVP stage--we're planning on doing an alpha launch this month. We effectively haven't raised money and consider ourselves 50/50 partners.
Two weeks ago, I was talking to someone who has been working on a SaaS product in the same space for the past few years (in Europe; we're on the other side of the ocean) and was about to release it. I offered for him to fly out and work with us for two weeks before he launched to see if he wanted to join us instead.
Working together has gone pretty well, and we're asking ourselves: what would be a fair/standard distribution of equity in the following scenarios?
1) He launches his product, and joins us a co-founder. Assume that maintaining it would probably take up about half his time for the first ~6 months and then gradually reduce to very little.
2) He doesn't launch his product, and instead folds his work into what we're doing. Our project is much larger in scope and his SaaS product could be re-purposed to fit what we're doing (as a fairly small component of what we're building), if we are successful.
Our project has a $BN ceiling, and is much more ambitious in scale, and is very high-risk. His product probably has a low-to-mid 6-figure revenue ceiling, is low-risk, and the market is likely to mostly disappear in the next few years.