Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

What is the agreement on equity, etc? Is it concrete? What are the chances he will remove you from the company? What is it worth to you to go after him if he does that? Is he just leading you on so you keep doing work on a prototype or project he may just abandon - though expect ownership from still? What are your overall skills? Are you working on other projects to pay bills? Do you have other ideas you'd enjoy working on? I could ask more questions though the issue really is the lack of transparency. It doesn't sound like he's explaining anything to you. Him getting hired by VCs sounds a bit like conflict of interest, though it could be innocent, especially if he has said that he's still expecting to raise $X amount.

View on HN

The agreement on equity is 50/50. It's originally my idea and the stuff that's technically interesting in it is mostly my work. I very much doubt he could pull it off just by himself (technically). I'd have more technical chances of success but less business (which is why I chose to work with him).

I made the mistake to work solely on this project and to rely on my savings. Only lately I've started to look around for project to pay the bills and I see fulltime employment as probably the only currently viable way to go (I finished my CS PhD (SemanticWeb) about a year ago and although I do have coding skills and industry experience, it's not enough, I feel I need more experience to do consulting and more networking, etc. to do freelancing).

Man, if it's your idea and if you've done most of the work, get some balls and fight for your project !

1) Is this agreement verbal or on paper ?

2) If you can do the technical bits then do it by yourself. Then once you have it all finished you will be the one the VCs will be chasing.

3) I don't know anybody who does consulting/freelancing in the IT industry. You are either a permanent employee or a contractor. You want to get a contracting position where you are doing something low level e.g. fixing bugs or testing websites. That way you will earn tonnes of money and not be stressed from work. Anybody can get into contracting.

1) It's only verbal

2) I will probably try. It's not a technological project though. It's much more Twitter-like rather than nuclear-fusion-like. So the business and execution side is really important. It involves non-trivial technology but it's no rocket science. A similar idea was very popular at a last year's TechCrunch disrupt and I see that the team is still pursuing it...

3) Interesting, that's new for me. But thinking about it actually I probably also know only people who are contracting.. In any case, I have some interesting potential offers that would allow me to learn stuff that I probably wouldn't be able to as a contractor, at least not easily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com