rugpuller

It's funny how obvious some things are in hindsight. I never once thought there'd be an issue with a 50/50 split; but yes, no one person has power of veto. Interesting about vesting equity though, I'd not heard of that before (naive much?).

There's a twist to the tale though: we haven't incorporated a company yet. No shares have been split; we've just got a verbal agreement that we'd divide them up that way. If I wanted to do a Zuckerberg, I could quite easily register the company and put myself on as the sole director.

That's definitely a fair point, 3 months is a long time.

It's gone on so long mainly because we ended up having separate responsibilities. It all sounds a bit silly in retrospect. After he said he'd tackle the business stuff--instead of coding which he couldn't find time for--our responsibilities pretty much ran in parallel without intersecting. Until now.

I've had my head down for those 3 months--baring in mind this is part-time--hacking away, and it's only when I've come to start dealing with things he was responsible for (like, "Hey, you manage to get a VPS for our test box yet?" "No, sorry mate been too busy.") that I've realised that he's effectively done nothing for a good few months.

In hindsight, we should've been communicating more. I shouldn't have let this go on for so long; at least not without some communication.

You're right, of course. It's by no stretch of the imagination complete, but it's getting very close to our minimum viable product to push out the door.

Maybe I'm a control freak, or maybe I'm impatient; I like your suggestion but I can see it now: he'll agree to it, then nothing would come of it for a few weeks/months, then I'd grab the reins again and do it myself.

After having this discussion on HN, I'm definitely of the mind that his and my timeframes are just incompatible. Looking back, he's had a casual and slow, "it'll be done when it's done" attitude, while I'm very much of the fail-fast mindset (aka push it out the door ASAP and see what happens).

Thanks for the thoughts.

You are, of course, correct. I've been a bit cowardly so far, but that needs to change; I'll talk to him and see if we can't work things out. At the very least, I should make him aware I'm feeling like this.

I believe there aren't really any problems, just he doesn't have a lot of free time with a full time job and family; but you're right, I may not be aware of the full picture here.

I'm honestly not interested in screwing the guy, we've both (mentally) invested in this project even if he hasn't contributed significantly to the actual work itself. An honest sit-down is definitely the way to go.

Thanks.

Your third point is something I've been trying to keep in mind; of course I want more, but I'm conscious of that desire so hopefully it won't get the better of me. I keep reminding myself that "50% of something is better than 100% of nothing". Sincerely though, I'm not interested in owning the whole company out of greed, I'm just conscious of splitting it 50/50 when the responsibilities currently aren't stacked in that manner.

Mainly, I'm just unhappy because he really is doing nothing. We split out our responsibilities--with myself taking most of the hard work--and despite that I've still ended up fulfilling both of our roles.

There's an aspect to this that I'm thinking we may just be operating on different timescales. I do believe he'd come through in the end, but I get the distinct impression his end may be in a year or two, while I'm aiming at considerably nearer than that.

Obviously, the solution to all this is to just talk to him, but I'd rather get my slaps here if I'm being silly before saying anything stupid.