Team, Co-founders & Legal

My co-founder and I are drifting on commitment. One of us is all-in, the other has a job. What do we do?

A starting point

Unequal commitment is the most common way early teams quietly break. Name it out loud instead of resenting it. Either the part-time founder sets a hard date to go full-time, or you renegotiate equity to reflect reality, because someone risking their salary is contributing far more than someone hedging with a job. Do not let a part-time co-founder hold full-founder equity indefinitely. Vesting is the tool that makes this fixable rather than fatal.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Read Use

Read

📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Intermediate

Why we picked it The India-specific piece that tells you where the split actually gets signed. It separates the founders' agreement (equity, roles, IP, vesting between you) from the shareholders' agreement (your terms with investors), and stresses the timing that trips Indian founders up: get vesting in writing before shares are issued, because you cannot bolt it on retroactively once the cap table exists. It also breaks down good-leaver vs bad-leaver treatment, which is the clause that decides what a departing cofounder actually keeps.

Founder Vesting in a Shareholders' Agreement: What Startup Founders Must Know

From Treelife by Treelife 10 min read

  • Document cofounder equity and vesting at or before incorporation and before shares issue, since Indian law makes retroactive vesting nearly impossible without every founder consenting
  • The 4-year vest with 1-year cliff is standard in India too, with unvested shares forfeited to the company at nominal price in a bad-leaver exit
  • Negotiate clear, objective good-leaver vs bad-leaver criteria and ensure already-vested shares are retained regardless of how you exit
Open treelife.in →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it A concrete account of co-founders going full-time on a stagger, not in lockstep: Erich left his job in July 2018 to run sales and marketing while Alessandro stayed in private equity and only quit months later, after the product had shipped and pulled 4,000+ downloads in under a month. It is the closest real example to your situation, where one founder is in and the other is deciding, and it shows the leap tied to a shipped product and early traction rather than a vibe. Use it to pressure-test your own 'hard date to go full-time.'

Quitting Our Jobs to Follow Our Callings

From Indie Hackers by Alessandro DiSanto and Erich Kerekes 12 min read

  • Co-founders can go full-time on a stagger, but each leap was pinned to a milestone (a launched product, real download and rating numbers), not left open-ended
  • The full-time founder carried the operating load (sales and marketing) while the other finished at his job, which is workable only if the imbalance is named and time-boxed, not permanent
  • Set your own trigger: theirs was a shipped app and early traction, so decide what proof lets the part-timer quit, and put a date on it
Open indiehackers.com →

Use

🛠️ Tool
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it This is the tool for the exact fight you are having: it scores each founder across Idea, Business Plan, Domain Expertise, and (crucially) Commitment and Risk, then hands you a number. Demmler states plainly that a founder who is all-in is worth far more than one who will 'sit on the sideline and be cheerleaders,' so you can move the argument off feelings and onto a shared spreadsheet. Run it twice: once at today's real commitment, once assuming the part-timer goes full-time, and the gap is your renegotiation.

The Founders' Pie Calculator

From Carnegie Mellon University by Frank Demmler 15 min read

  • Commitment and Risk is a weighted equity factor, not an afterthought: the person keeping a salary scores lower on it, and the math reflects that
  • Opportunity cost counts. Someone who forgoes a career to join full-time is contributing something the hedging co-founder is not, and the pie should show it
  • It turns a resentment conversation into a numbers conversation both of you fill in together, which is far easier to survive than 'I feel like I'm doing more'
Open andrew.cmu.edu →

People also ask

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