splitting the pie 🥧 🍰
Was reading this post on r/SaaS yesterday. Cofounder rage quit, forked the repo, emailed paying customers saying he's "the real founder," then deleted himself from Slack. Lawyers now involved. Investors panicking. The works.
The guy was at 35% equity. Kept saying he felt like an employee in his own startup. The other founder says he's been doing all the fundraising, sales, ops, support, marketing. Who knows what actually happened. But it got me thinking.
I've been there. Sort of.
Years ago I co-founded a company. Three people, equal split. Quickly became two. That transition was painful. The kind that sticks with you.
IMO it comes down to this word: fair.
Fair can mean the equity split. But it also means the effort people put in. The risk they take. The value they actually bring. It's a team effort, there's group dynamics at play. These things don't always line up. And when they don't, it starts to rot. Someone starts feeling like they're carrying more weight than they're getting credit for. Or the opposite. Either way, resentment builds. And then one day someone forks your repo at 2am.
There's a framework I like from Frank Demmler called the Founders' Pie Calculator. Simple idea: list relevant domains (idea, business plan, domain expertise, commitment, responsibilities), give each a weight based on your specific company, score each founder. Multiply, sum, done.
It's not magic. But it's concrete. And the nice thing is: it shows you almost never land on an even split if you're being honest.
That said, any framework like this is just a snapshot. What happens when someone starts with less responsibility but six months later turns out to be exactly what the company needs? If the equity doesn't reflect that, you've built in a potential problem. And then you prolly realize: finding a fair split is hard, but making a team work where someone feels unfairly treated is way harder. Maybe even impossible.
I don't have a clean answer here. (Does anyone?)
My gut kinda says: take 100%, divide by founders. Keep it simple. But at the very least, go through something like Demmler's framework together. Not to follow it exactly, but because the conversation matters. You learn what people actually expect. You find out what they assume. You find out if you're aligned or just pretending to be.
Because all of this stands or falls with the relationship. The equity split should support that, not break it.
In the end, it's about people. Always is.