joel_perl_prog

Hello everyone. (Assuming this ever gets seen and read!) I have a situation where I need some advice. My scenario is that 2.5 years ago, I created a business from a side project. It's anti-piracy software/service, and it's got a relatively sophisticated back end -- spidering, automation, scaling to large data sets, etc). It's a fully functional, revenue-generating business. Growing very quickly, in fact.

But because of how I developed it as a side project, I have no ownership share, I'm not a co-founder in a legal sense, in other words. It's just a company that was spawned during my free time, at the parent company I work for (a very small, private company, in case you were wondering about which one).

I'm attempting to get the president of the parent company I work for to restructure the anti-piracy business in such a way that I have some kind of co-foundership or ownership share. She claims we would have to implement a complicated (for tax purposes, etc) ESOP system, which costs 30 to 50 thousand dollars annually, just per regulations, is what she told me. So that's out. Plus that's not co-foundership, which is what I'm looking for.

So maybe my question is: is anybody interested in seeing some very interesting numbers, having a very interesting discussion about an anti-piracy business, and possibly looking into a future venture? Maybe that's my question: who do I approach about that? I don't live in the Bay area.... And I haven't, in the past, been especially familiar with start-up culture (aside from reading about it on here =)), or the methods of starting a small technology company.

Thanks!

J