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Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

I am the technical cofounder, I am most definitely not leaving the company :) I couldn't have described the reasons we are looking for a cofounder and not an employee better than zaidf - expectations, equity, and pay. We expect full dedication, tremendous force of will to change the world, incredible technical expertise, and capability to lead people and define the company. In exchange, we will give a significant chunk of equity (it's not a 0.25% - 0.5% deal at all), and because it's such an early stage, we cannot pay a competitive salary yet.

Expecting these things and calling the person an employee would be dishonest at best. We're in this to nurture a great company, not to nurture our egos. We feel that assigning a title of employee at this stage would be a display of vanity and would significantly detract us from the real goal of building a next generation database that will change the world.

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We clearly have different opinions here. I'd say that calling an employee a cofounder is dishonest at best; that you're in this to nurture a great compnay, not to nurture your employee's ego; and that for someone who joins several months after a company is founded to insist on being called a founder is an unreasonable display of vanity.

dude, what the hell is wrong with you? You can still technically write someone in as a cofounder -- both in terms of equity and pay. Just because you're recruiting them later than the initial founding team doesn't reduce the title. Saying that it's dishonest is just wrong here.

You can still technically write someone in as a cofounder -- both in terms of equity and pay.

You can give someone the amounts of equity and salary which are normally given to cofounders, but that doesn't make them a cofounder. The word "cofounder" doesn't say what you do; it says what you did -- specifically, it says that co-founded something (in this context, a company).

No it doesn't. You're just playing semantic word games.

If I incorporate a company one day and bring you on board the next day with half of the available founders equity then would you argue that you're "just an employee" because you weren't there on the day that the company was incorporated?

You're just playing semantic word games.

When did attempting to maintain consistency in how the English language is used become playing semantic word games?

... would you argue that you're "just an employee" ...

No, for two reasons. First, I wouldn't say just an employee, since I don't consider that word to be derogatory; and second, I wouldn't stop at saying that I was an employee (unless I was deliberately attempting to obfuscate) because that would fail to mention a large equity stake. I would probably say "early employee", "co-owner", or something else along those lines.

But if the company was founded without the intention that I would be part of it, I would never claim to be a co-founder.

My father has a daughter with his second wife. I call her my sister, not my half-sister, because I love her and would never want to connote that her value is in any way diminished because we have different mothers.

Sometimes using a label that is technically incorrect is the most succinct way to make a point.

This is a bit of a semantic game, and a bit of attacking windmills, but sometimes that can be an enormous amount of fun. So I'll indulge.

In practice, founding a company is a process, not an event, and hence is an interval of time, not a specific point in time. Legally, founding a company is considered an event at a given point in time, purely for reasons of convenience (how do you tax something that came into existence over a period of time?)

If you look at it that way, we're coming from the practical standpoint, not from a legal standpoint, and we feel that on the practical side we're still founding the company. If you look at it this way, poof, the inconsistency disappears like a cloud of smoke :)

- I don't think someone who has equity relatively close to the other cofounders should be called an employee. I don't think this is a controversial stance, no?

- I don't think it is fair to expect your 1st employee to put in 15-20 hour days consistently. Even if the 1st employee did put in such effort, as Rethink guys point out, they would be putting in almost the same effort as them and thus calling him/her an "employee" would be wrong.

- A big objection you seem to have relates to how long the company has existed. You think that 3 months is a long time for a cofounder to come in. If you look at the longterm roadmap of a startup, the initial 3 months hardly register. Do you think 10 years from now the new cofounder will look back and feel inferior to the other founders? With each passing day the 3 month thing becomes less significant.

Your disagreements are not so much about semantics as your lack of understanding between the possible difference in pay, expectations etc. between a cofounder and 1st employee. It might be subtle but it exists.

I'd like to suggest another factor that usually separates a co-founder from an employee: control. What amount of control will you give to the third guy, will he have a formal vote on core decisions?

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