Tweet Many of you have noticed my latest weekend project, the Co-Founder Equity Calculator. An incredible number of users reported that the equity split reported by the calculator was within a few percent points of what they chose for their startup. Spooky! Many wanted to know how it works. The calculator is quite simple. Let me [...]

Tweet I just responded to that question on Quora, and since many people ask me the same question during co-founders meetups, I might as well post my answer here once and for all. Q: I just met someone who looks like a potential co-founder for me. What should I ask to tell if he is [...]

Tweet My startup needed to raise $500K to expand our marketing efforts and get the word out. Raising the money was quite easy: I issued some new shares and listed them on StartupIPOs.com. It’s a marketplace for accredited investors. Startups that need funding list their offerings, and people buy their shares. The price is set [...]

Tweet I love advising early-stage startups. A question I get frequently is “how to formalize bringing a co-founder on board.” I could write a book on the topic, but it’s really much simpler than that. Here’s how you do it in one tweet: @joe I expect this co-founder position to be worth ~30% equity. My [...]

Tweet At an iPhone developer Meetup a few nights ago, an iPhone developer asked me a key question: “how much equity in my project should I offer to the technical writer that I need to finish my app?” His gut feeling was that as the main developer, he of course should keep most of the [...]

Tweet Today we are excited to announce an enhancement to the way you create projects with FairSoftware. Many of you asked us for a more flexible way to add co-founders early on and offer more flexibility on the allocation of shares, since you haven’t always found all your co-founders by the time you have your [...]

Tweet A few years ago, a friend of mine founded a startup with a long-time colleague who was a great salesman. It turned out that the Web 2.0 business my friend was running didn’t actually require those sales skills and so after a few months he had to let this person go. That could have [...]

Tweet TechCrunch’s coverage of our new Fair Blogs has generated quite a bit of discussion on the best way to compensate a bloggers network. My Page, My Ads A popular view is that each blogger should be paid for the pages they write. Essentially, if you wrote the entry, the ads on that page are [...]