Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Joining a Startup
by TuringNYC on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @05:38PM
(#12552500)
The biggest red flag to me seems this: "second founder ducked out after about 8 months—with a sizable percentage of the company." The founders should have been on a vesting schedule to prevent this -- or every founder has an incentive to just duck out and keep all their equity. IIRC YC requires such vesting agreements, and for good reasons.
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Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Joining a Startup
by hkmurakami on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @07:22PM
(#12553140)
Really depends on what size able means. Let's say the founders split the company 50/50. They're on a standard vesting schedule. One of them leaves after 1 year. They will have 12.5% of the company.
Do you consider this sizeable? I certainly would, and this will happen even if you have all the standard mechanisms in place!
Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Joining a Startup
by Bartweiss on Thursday September 22, 2016 @11:03AM
(#12557269)
There's an argument I've seen that founders should be on a thoroughly nonstandard vesting schedule, for exactly this reason. Slower vesting, a longer cliff, an event-based cliff, or some combination thereof.
It's a decent assumption that all successful, unpurchased startups take at least 3 years to hit it big. Given that, you could reasonably put a founder cliff at 2 years (with early vesting on buyout) as a show of faith.
Of course, the other argument is that if a founder leaves with 12.5% of your company something else is terribly wrong regardless.