A key employee as in he is putting about 1-5 hours of coding per week but we needed a good backend dev and he was the best I knew. He's a college friend and I don't know how best to deal with the situation of him not communicating.

I came to ask this question on HN because I wanted devs opinions, I know non-tech founders get bad reps here - and I understand if you want to attach that bias to me.

I put my life savings into this project, I didn't ask for favors. He makes us feel uncomfortable in our office, and cancels everytime I ask him to come in. We only work on Saturday/weeknights, because I have to have a job to pay for this startup endeavor.

I don't assume we are worth $1 million or anything. I don't mean to take a defense stance, but I thought giving a portion of the founders equity made sense since he was taking a pay cut from normal hours. If he would've worked for free (like we are) he would've got founder's equity, but we still need a frontend dev which we had to pay for because he frankly said "I can do it, but I don't want to".