Founders

Advice on structuring founder splits, setting vesting schedules for founder shares, and documenting what you agreed upon.

Slides without narration.

Steve Poland's 1X1Media Founders Equity-Split-Workbook (.slxs)

How should founders divide the company when they are starting a startup? Equal is fair almost always, and the math is easy. Sometimes unequal is fair, especially if one founder worked a year on her own to develop the intellectual property that is now the value proposition of a new startup, and the startup needs to more co-founders with deep domain knowledge.

Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on the biggest mistakes first-time founders make.

Topics 00:10 - Solving a problem you don't care about 1:00 - Helping users you don't care about 1:40 - Choosing cofounders you don't know well 2:20 - Not having transparent conversations with your cofounder 3:20 - Not launching 4:45 - Not using analytics 5:02 - Not knowing where your first users will come from 5:45 - Poor prioritization

Notes from Making the Most of Your 20s: A CEO’s Checklist for Accelerating Your Career, based on LinkedIn post by Rich Lesser, President and CEO, Boston Consulting Group, with Armstrong insights

This is the second half of the "Why to Start a Startup" lecture series by Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz. (You can view the both presentations as a single lecture on SamAltman.com; Sam's talk is entitled "Advice for Ambitious 19-Year-Olds," and I recommend that also if you have the time).

Genius Transcript of Sam and Dustin's talks

Should you look for a co-founder on a co-founder "dating" site? Hell, no! A bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder at all, and being a solo founder isn't all that great. You need someone who is relentlessly resourceful; think "James Bond" before thinking of "Product Expert."

See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec02/

Genius Lecture Transcript

Non-technical entrepreneurs, stop talking big and start building small. Bemoaning your inability to attract a technical co-founder to "just build it" is failure's waiting room. Hiring out an agency to build your grand vision now is a great way to lose quickly.

In Dan's own words: Learn from my useful mistakes and occasional successes, from cashing in my 401k to build a mediocre app I didn't need, to bootstrapping through Techstars as the program's only non-technical sole founder, to building out a great team at a (currently) thriving company that just closed a seven figure seed round. I will focus on the very short term nuts and bolts. We'll talk through what exactly can you do in the next four weeks to substantially move your idea forward. In our conversation, I'll answer questions, share my ideology and process, tips, tools, and talk plainly about the ups and downs of my own experience. How to scope your prototype, what to measure, what it is, and importantly, what it isn't (hint: a first version of your eventual product). How I hack process to get real milestones really quickly that can gut check your assumptions, or make it more attractive to potential technical talent, partners, or investors. Removing false positives from your prototypes, and determine true intention. (Don't ask people to say nice things about you and then take it as evidence). Cheat sheet on the free or cheap tools that will be your best friend. Startup frenemies. How to get good help from good people, and what offers you should refuse. Non-technical Founders can build great companies. So many fail by overestimating the first step.

Think small, and start building something great.

You and your co-founders each "own" hundreds of thousands of shares of stock in your startup. You're going to be rich, right? This scene from Startup.com (2001 documentary of a dot.com startup) shows what can happen when you don't require vesting of founder shares and employee stock options. Especially when you didn't know you should require a "one-year cliff."

I talk about vesting of shares in the founders lecture video above. If you don't require founders to "vest" their founders shares (which essentially means they "earn" them by sticking it out for the long haul or help to accomplish significant startup milestones), you are unwittingly creating substantial agency problems,