How should I split equity and think about founder salaries when neither of us has money and we don't want a fight later?
Equal splits feel fair on day one and cause the most disputes by year two, so split based on honest contribution, risk, and who's full-time, and put vesting on everyone (typically four years with a one-year cliff). On salary, pay yourselves as little as personal runway allows early, then formalize modest founder salaries once you raise or hit steady revenue, so the company isn't quietly funding your lifestyle off investor money. Write it all down and get it into a founders' agreement before the first real money arrives.
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YC's counterpoint is worth hearing precisely because it pushes back on being stingy: if this person is a real co-founder doing years of work ahead of you, generosity buys motivation across a four-year vest and prevents resentment. Read it against your traction story to decide honestly whether this is a true co-founder (lean generous) or an early employee wearing the title (grant, not founder equity). It is also the canonical source on why a one-year cliff and four-year vesting are non-negotiable.
A free, no-signup calculator that forces you and your co-founder to actually weigh the inputs (idea, roles, who is full time, who is CEO, capital) instead of defaulting to a lazy 50/50. Everything stays on your device, so it is a safe way to run the numbers together in one sitting. Treat its output as a conversation starter for negotiating your split, not a final verdict.
It turns a vague argument into a structured one: you assign weight to contributions and it hands back a percentage you can then discuss and adjust.
It deliberately pushes back on reflexive 50/50 splits, which is useful when one of you is full time and the other is not.
Know its limits: it assumes a 4 year vest with no cliff and does not model salaries or later cash investment, so pair it with a real vesting agreement.
When neither founder has money, the honest question is not 'what is fair' but 'what can the company afford without starving you.' This report is built from real accounting data across hundreds of funded startups, broken down by stage, so it gives you a grounded reference instead of a gut guess. The figures are US benchmarks (scale them down hard for an Indian bootstrapped context), but the underlying logic (pay yourself enough to not make desperate decisions, not so much that you shorten runway) travels anywhere.
Founder pay should track your cash position and stage, not your title: pre-funding it is often close to zero, and it steps up only as you raise real money.
Paying yourself far too little is a real risk too, not virtue, since a founder under personal financial stress makes worse decisions and can burn out.
Use the stage-by-stage medians as a sanity check, then adjust down for your cost of living and runway rather than copying a US number.
