🛠️ Tool
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Free
Intermediate
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'
