FWIW, it's not just you; these seem to be non-rare things to happen.

One can guess at the likelihood that egos, differing understandings/philosophies, or just plain greed are likely to become a showstopper problem.

But, unless it's obvious that the showstopper problems are likely (some people telegraph warning signs heavily), if one is ever going to do anything, one has to guess and sometimes take a leap of faith.

This is the chief reason why I'm the sole founder of my current venture. I'm not militant about avoiding cofounders (and I have actually scouted), but it would have to be a unicorn who is exceptionally good at the exact things that I'm bad at. Even then, I'd only do it after dipping my toe in over a number of months with smaller projects to gauge their personality and level of commitment.

This is also why I went the solo route for #2 (ignoring the investor/"expert" insistence on multiple founders). 10+ years later my bootstrapped (non-tech) company is profitable, has a strong dedicated base of customers, and allows me a degree of flexibility in my company direction and life that I would not have otherwise.

You've gotten much further than most ever will. Good work aqui!

Keep moving, Inward onward and upward

Seems like they get what they deserve...

You work and sleep.

The betrayal weighed on me for years, especially since I eventually had to involve lawyers. I think the most important thing you can do is find new opportunities to occupy your mind so you can learn from it but not dwell on it.

Legally speaking, my business partner secretly created a small equity pool for all co-founders excluding himself. There was no reason to believe we were in a pool, since co-founders split the entire pot.

This caused the percentages to seem about as expected. To the best of my knowledge, there were only two tells in the written contract:

1. The total shares were listed as ~1M, which at the time sounded perfectly logical. Unbeknownst to me, this was only the shares in the pool. I now know that startups often first allocate 10M shares, apparently for psychological reasons.

2. The vesting documents were titled an "equity incentive plan". At the time, this made perfect sense to me; the entire reason for us all reverse vesting is to provide incentive to stay. However, I now know this specific phrase often indicates an equity pool.

I recommend all founders speak with the lawyers jointly, instead of delegating it to the CEO. Ideally, also pass the contract by a startup-savvy lawyer. (In our case, one of our co-founders showed a CPA who said everything looked normal.) I recommend not signing until the exact cap table with zero errors is jointly signed. (As I mentioned above, I pointed out a mistake to my business partner then signed after he replied I had the most equity.) I also recommend contacting your business partner's references if you haven't worked together, especially since they will be providing those to VCs later.

Or were all communications referenced verbal rather than written?

That makes them personally liable iiuc...

(1) it was only a year and many startups go bust anyway;

(2) the best people spend their energy on the future, not the past; and

(3) regardless of the facts, many people are wary of working with someone who sued his business partner personally. (As Trump shows, portraying yourself as the victim of a baseless lawsuit often elicits sympathy, while justifying bringing a lawsuit often requires a careful factual explanation.)

Even if it didn't help you personally, having pursued it more vigorously would have been a public good as it would ensure a documented record of the misdeed which future prospects could use to avoid the bad actor, as well as discouraging new bad actors from developing as they would see the loss rate as exceeding the win rate etc.

As long as everyone keeps letting shit go, letting bad actors off without penalty just because it would take more effort than it was personally worth, then we will continue to see these behaviors manifested and likely at an increasing rate as it proves it's effectiveness.

Heh. My company has exactly one (1) share, probably also for psychological reasons.

The lawyer preparing the corporate documents is the corporation’s lawyer. That person cannot also be your lawyer. Every founder should have their own lawyer review and advise them on the paperwork.

I tried twice to start software companies with people I knew. Both times the other party didn't invest nearly as much time as I was putting in. And in both cases I figured this out fairly early and started to match their drive and investment into what we were building. As you'd expect, the companies folded within a few months.

What's interesting to me is that one of the guys I'm still friends with and the story he tells for why it folded is very different from my view. To him, it was me backing away and causing it fail and from my experience, it was I switched from working on it 7 days a week to working on it two weekends a month. I don't think he's being mean spirited here - I think he is just that clueless about what was going on.

My current start-up was founded differently. My partner and I did multiple smaller projects together to see if we could work together. We also went through a deep dive on "past traumas" (key life defining moments for us) along with exercises on what sorts of values we want to inject into the company (ranging from how we handle feedback, to how we respond to failure, to what our employees would say about us and the company 2 years in the future, etc.). This allowed us to understand where we are coming from, figure out if our values aligned, and help lean on each other when things got hard/stressful. It really does make navigating building something together. Basically "wtf?!" reactions can easily be replaced with "uh oh, is everything okay?"

Yes that's basically what happened. I get that this is their perception, but find it funny how much self-awareness is lacking as to what they contributed. I'm still friends with them and still like them, but they are firmly in the camp of "nope" moving forward.

> Maybe they were doing more than you realised, or maybe they were just freeloading.

I'd love for it to be the case where they were doing more than I realized, but considering we're all engineers and I'm the only one working on designs and implementing code...and driving all the discussions...you get the idea.

Then you can still work with them as long as their incentives are aligned with what you need them to do. That is the intended behaviour fits within their perception.

It also reminds me to only work on startups with someone who you really know and trust, like a best friend.

2 weeks ago I signed the contract to "sell" my shares for my startup of ~7 years. I'm just now starting to realize how utterly miserable I had been for a long, long time.

It's a very difficult decision, but it gets easier every day (on average, some days can still be tough).

It's only going to get better.

At some point they forget that the value others brought to the table was a big part of what made them participate in the first place. Now they devalue all of those other players.