Ask HN: Job/Possible related startup situation
One of the owners of the company (small one, something like 10 employees), who has the lower percentage of the partners and is the only one with software knowledge, came up and made me a proposal to slowly start a side project that eventually could turn into a profitable endeavor. The new idea is correlated with the industry of the company, so this partner could simply tell me to build it for their company, but it seems that his idea is to leave the company eventually if this side project takes off.
Also he told me that they're looking to sell the company to a bigger player but they rejected the offer because it was insufficient money wise.
So I'm thinking what would be a good course of action while I build an MVP (I couldn't help it). From what I see there are five players in this story:
1. The other partners of the company wanting to sell it. 2. The software partner with the lowest share wanting to start up something else. 3. Me. Interested on starting a new company but also interested on working for the bigger player if there is an interesting proposal. 4. The bigger player interested in buying the company, but not enough to make a compelling offer. 5. The people from the other job I have.
Thinking about a win-win scenario my initial idea is the following one:
Build MVP, show it to the owners and, if interested, ask for a percentage of their company for me and a percentage increase for the software partner, effective only if the bigger player, interested in the value this new project could bring to their company and decides to make a good offer.
This strategy as you can see has a lot of big IFs so I don't think is the ideal path so I'm trying to come up with a better one.
Have you experienced something similar? What would you do in my place?