Ask HN: equity split (engineer founder == ceo)

Note: despite being a longer post, this is a pick your own ending style post with some clear choices @ the end. Your thoughts/feedback welcome across any of the content here-in...

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I'm the technical founder, and the business guy. I enthusiastically & regularly toil - investing my time almost exclusively on the product. The product and the company are going to be blockbusters.

I feel like I'm making decent progress but could be moving [faster, better, stronger] if there was a way to divide and conquer, and would love a brilliant mind to brainstorm with --- i.e., co-founder.

I don't have any technical hackers in my network, and the guys I'd like to meet probably aren't going to networking events. So I kept the process casual and met with the best people in their respective fields, landed on one recent potential person...

I recently met with a co-founder-worthy (assume true) person, who's a 'business guy'. This person is talented w/marketing, and a good guy - thru separate avenues we both had landed at the same conclusion and were hoping to start companies in the same space. This guy works currently at a company with lots of awesome engineers, and is friends with some of them (as much friends as an engineer and marketer could be) and so his main value add for me was effectively buying access to the engineers in his network.

To take the potential fit further, we filled in Dan Shapiro's equity calculator together (and some others) and that's where I am at now, and looking for some feedback from you guys...

Maybe it's a function of crappy calculators, maybe my expectations are way off, the calculators spit out 55% me, 45% him, including the fact that I'm building the product myself, and we were basically evenly matched on other categories. It left me feeling confused, and the potential co-founder with the sense that it was fair.

The potential co-founder talked to his MBA buddies who think 30% is minimum for being involved. Even if we did Dan's calculator wrong, I still feel like 30% is absurd for a business-only hustler in the early stages (pre product) here. If we need an amazing hustler business person downstream for certain things, what prevents us from hiring that? Is it really worth all this, to just get access to the engineers in his network?

Wanted to get some HN feedback & suggestions on next steps, what are your thoughts?

  1. Part ways amicably with potential co-founder
  2. Partner up, much lower share for him
  3. Partner up, that 55/45 split sounds about right
  4. Something different?

For #2 & #3, was thinking about using vesting terms as a way to have him be accountable for bringing the right engineering candidates into the hiring/3rd-founder funnel, know of a better way?

Thank you for taking the time to read this!