sultanofswing

A little context:

My cofounder and I started our company about a year ago and have already raised a pre-seed round. My cofounder (CEO) and I (CTO / Product) agreed at the time that we would do a 50/50 split with 1 tie breaking vote going to him to avoid gridlock.

We had a minority stake cofounder at the time who was since left the company with some additional equity re entering our pool.

This was done at the advice of YC. We both started the company together at the same time, and I also quit my job to start with (former FAANG employee).

All in all I would say this split has been positive for us. There have never been any tie breaking votes, our delineation of responsibility is very clearly stated and we meet 2-3 times a week.

The problem:

Our lead VC has this idea in their head that the CEO should have more equity and even brought this up during our initial raise, though didn’t really push the issue (again my cofounder DOES have more equity to avoid gridlock, and ultimately has final decision making power if things came to a vote).

My cofounder actually likes our current arrangement because he feels like we are as close to 50/50 as we could reasonably get and are extremely invested in the company. He suggested I meet with them to hear them out but at the end of the day said it’s our choice, and the most important thing to him is that our relationship goes undamaged.

What is the best way to handle this convo and give reasonable pushback. If I’m being frank it honestly annoys me that this keeps getting brought up (feels like they are trying to screw me on some weird level) and I can’t think of any rational reason for it besides some cargo cult type thinking they have.

Is there something I’m missing here / any rational reason why this would actually make sense for me and the company?

Hi all, I realize the answers here may be biased (we are after all on Hacker News).

I recently fielded an offer from an unnamed Venture Studio.

For those unfamiliar a Venture Studio model is like an accelerator with these key differences (feel free to ignore my summary and also Google this): - The startup idea comes from a pool of researched / vetted startup ideas from the studio. They purportedly will have highlighted things / products they believe have good potential for product market fit - The venture studio may match you with a cofounder after vetting similar interests backgrounds etc (so a slightly more filtered version of founder dating going on here) - The studio will generally provide more capital than an accelerator for a bigger portion of the pie (given they are providing the idea, the network, and capital out of the gate)

In this particular example (have fudged the numbers within a certain range so as to not out anyone in particular) the studio offers the following: - Idea, network for cofounder - Starting salary in the 100-150k range - Seed funding round in the ~1m dollar range

In return cofounders get ~25-36% of the startup (so about 12-18% each) post seed round funding.

Now obviously you are losing a lot of equity compared to if you had raised this seed money yourself, but the promise is of some degree of mitigated risk and guaranteed funding at the outset to build a team with.

Would love to hear from anyone that has experiences with this model and what the pros/cons might be compared to joining a place like YC (Techstars, 500 Startups etc)