How do I re-negotiate the terms of my startup?

1 pointsby purplerabbit11 tahun yang lalu2 comments

I've invested ~100 hours in the app idea of a family friend, collaborating with him very loosely as I've developed. His central idea is great, but when we meet, he spends most of his time talking about bolted-on features, such as survey-based advertising, cloud storage, and celebrity promotion, which would completely trash the app's cohesion and user experience. So what I've been developing is essentially the central 20% of his idea.

This friend has no business or technical experience, and works full time as a (successful) manual laborer. What this means is that if I want the app to go anywhere, I will be in charge of financing, advertising, and recruiting customers, not to mention 100% of the development itself.

This friend is a very down-to-earth guy with six kids, and I respect him, but his initial vision of 50-50 co-ownership is obviously not going to work. Since he won't be contributing to the growth or operation of our startup, I feel like it's fair for him to own maybe 10-20% of, it as collateral for the initial idea.

Is this reasonable of me to conclude? How should I confront him about this?

1 comments

dudul11 tahun yang lalu

If I understand your post correctly there is nothing to "re-negotiate" since at this point there is no established company. The way I see it, you can legally do whatever the heck you want, you can even decide to go solo, you wrote all the code and have full ownership of it.

Now, if this is someone you want to remain friends with it's different :)

What you suggest is very reasonable, you can give him some equity in the entity and maybe allow him to seat on the board, and if it is clearly understood by all parties that he won't contribute anything past the original idea I don't see how that would be a problem.

purplerabbit11 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for the reply! You are understanding correctly. The original "negotiation" wasn't legal at all. And our company isn't real.

This makes me feel a lot more confident... I guess everything that's been made is completely mine.