Suppose I did have some bucks in the bank and did get a lawyer - how would they help? So far my co-founder has been pretty unreasonable with regards to compromising and/or negotiaton.
The investor so far has also been very neutral and I think will remain so.
Whilst the investor might consider that taking sides in personal aspects of the dispute looks unprofessional and might not see your compensation
as a priority, surely the only way they could actually be truly 'neutral' on the future of the business is if they've already written the investment off as a bad one. (Which in itself would be useful to know)
Otherwise I would expect them to be (i) interested in ensuring the underlying tech was maintainable in future, which if nothing else might result in more reasonable earnout possibilities for you and (ii) concerned that one of the founders apparently wishes to cut others out of the business to turn it into his personal cash cow, particularly if the other founder is the one with monetisation ideas.
It's not guaranteed that the investor is your friend (another possibility is that replacing you and taking the business in a different direction is something they quietly encouraged) but I wouldn't expect them to be 'neutral' on whether the business has a chance of generating them a return or not.
Assuming you weren't, it's very strange to force someone out right before their equity vests.
Basically, your lawyer can understand the situation better than an internet message board can. Then, a phone call from your lawyer to your co-founder could help make your co-founder become a lot more reasonable.
> it's very strange to force someone out right before their equity vests
If the business-minded folk don't fully value the tech solution I can easily see this happening. This "devil's advocate" hypothetical is not an unheard of occurrence.
If this is the case, (and we don't know the details,) it means that the other founder was acting in bad faith. Hopefully the threat of a lawsuit is enough to solve the situation.
That was my thought. This is exactly what you would do if you thought you needed a little tech work up front but that it wasn't actually all that important to the future of the thing.
100% true. The non-technical cofounder is doing this because he thinks he can get away with it easily. The investor will go along because he's in it for the money. Involving a good lawyer makes it clear that you won't go down without a fight. A fight that could destroy the business. It's amazing how reasonable people can be when they realize that it's in their best interest to be reasonable.
The typical tech lawyer has seen this exact scenario ~20 times. You probably have some leverage, and spending $1-2k to figure out how much and how best to apply it, given the lawyer's experience, makes tons of sense.
Exactly what you should do depends on a lot of details about exactly what your business setup looks like, what your personal situation is, and what the other parties to the situation think. Way more detail is needed than you'd provide to any of us internet randoms. A good lawyer who understands these kinds of contracts is somebody you can actually give all of the important details to and who can give you accurate advice for your situation. This is not a good time for some weird quirk of your contract or any related laws to surprise you. If your co-founder is being unreasonable, you need to know what your escalation options are, and you may need to communicate that you are prepared to execute on them promptly if they don't give you what you feel is a reasonable deal.
You don’t hire a developer just because they can say some jargon. They need to show proof of skill, either through code of theirs you can see, the interview process, whatever.
Similarly, business people don’t take shit like this seriously until lawyers are involved. They see no evidence of your ability to actually hold them to account and so believe they can just push you around.
Hiring a professional who knows how to actually hold the other side legally accountable, or make them hurt (tens of thousands of bucks in lawyer fees and months down the drain if the case goes to court) shows you mean business.
Otherwise it’s just talk.
A lawyer is also an expert and can give expert advice, both strategic (what should we do?) and tactical (how do we do it?) based on knowledge and experience. Exactly the same way you do in your technical domain. Would you want advice from a non-engineer on how to architect or build something? What database to use? No.
Like developers, lawyers cost money for a reason, and it’s because of the value they can bring.
Yeah, spend the money and a good lawyer. The 1000bucks I spend on a lawyer to send a you suing the wrong person letter to a company that’s now worth over trillion was the best money spend.
It's not so much that they'll torch the company. They're just saying they don't have the cash so need to reduce my stake. They will budge on the 3% I'm sure, but I don't value the equity much if I'm not involved.
I'm not too sure what a lawyer would recommend at this point? I also can't really afford one personally - especially as I may be out of work soon haha..
If you're not valuing the equity if you're not involved, then honestly you need to look at this from an opportunity cost perspective.
The trust is fundamentally broken, so it's not really worthwhile to pursue this as collaborators. Unless you're keen to run the business yourself, there isn't much point in fighting this beyond getting your 1st year vesting.
It's honestly not worth your time and energy fighting for something you're not keen to do. And it's definitely cheaper for them to give you 7% more than the 3% offered, and avoid all this hassle and potential legal expense.
If you do want to persist, then you need the investor on your side, as otherwise you can't force the other person out (they'd still keep their 10% but that's the price you pay for that move).
I have to say I find it really odd that someone who's invested $100k is being silent on this, or isn't worried about this situation, especially if the future of the business is now more of a lifestyle business. I fail to see how they'd get a return they'd expect. I'd assume they're actually on the other side, but want to appear neutral.
FWIW if you end up leaving, I'd advise not agreeing to a non-compete or a non-disclosure. It's not about you starting a competitor, but more about them not being able to restrict your future options as they're forcing you out, and they will have to potentially consider the threat of you competing with them at any point in the future.
It's a credit to your efforts that you've built the tech of business that's gotten such good traction and numbers, so you've got learnings and experience that will serve you in good stead in the future.
It's just unfortunate that you ended up with such shitty partners.
Good luck, and I assume quite a few of us will be hoping you bounce back from this, and rooting for you.
I don’t understand how “the need for cash” and “reducing your stake” are connected. If they need cash, they can raise another round and everyone gets diluted like normal.
If you don’t value the equity, offer to sell it to the seed investor at a discount.
That was more a rhetorical question. The real issue is you can’t predict how long you’ll live so it’s not correct to say “draw it all down evenly over X years”
Thanks for chiming in and passing our feedback along--much appreciated.
In addition Messenger I'd also add Mobile Carousels. A pure JS Expo SDK is needed to support these. I think you'd be surprised how many apps are mobile only these days and would love to use Intercom, but are turning to other options like this instead.
If RN support is something you're actively looking for, I'd love to learn more about your use case if you want to email me at alex (at) papercups.io :)
I saw this immediately after submitting my comment above and I was like why would you want to give such access to someone who is more than likely non-technical. I can't see any pros from this unless it's locked to read only mode but then at $50 you're just paying for an excel view into your app.
I disagree, speaking on production data, if your CEO is technical enough they should be able to do this (for whatever reason they have).
If not, you need some sort of admin interface (could be a couple forms) to address this properly so invalid data can't be plopped in OR any changes should be documented and sent to someone technical even if it's a typo fix. It seems fun and easy but production data isn't something you should wrap in an excel interface and give to any and everyone. $600 a year so your boss can update names and dates is kinda hard to justify as well.
I'm pretty good at UX and I don't have any issues with the current experience. It actually really helped me for my use case.
I wouldn't use a spreadsheet. While I clicked 'How was this calculated?', I realised I didn't care.
Your mistake is thinking the purpose of the app is to give the user the perfect objective recommendation. For most decisions, you just want some kind of psychological justification - for some people that can even be a coin flip.
The "objective recommendation" and "just psychological justification" groups seem to me a vastly different target audiences. For the latter, this tool is already overcomplicated; it could be done as a list of input fields and a button that highlights one of them at random.
I'm glad the tool helped in your case. I can imagine it helping in mine once, but me getting immediately frustrated. In my own philosophy of UX, I generally don't care much about tools you're only going to use once in your life; I focus on ones that you're going to use repeatedly. Repeated use has different priorities - in particular, efficiency over hand holding.
The investor so far has also been very neutral and I think will remain so.