Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake. Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because "it was my idea," or because "I was more experienced" or anything else.Joel Spolsky
It is not often that I read something online and find myself agreeing to every single opinion / statement. The quote above is just a small piece of an awesome statement by Joel Spolsky on how ownership & equity should be split amongst co-founders in a startup.
I started Premium News Themes back in the day, started collaborating with Magnus & Mark and after a couple of months we spun out of that and created WooThemes. Back then it was my suggestion to democratize the power within the company and we all thus shared equally in the equity. To this day, I think that is one of the best decisions that I / we could have ever made as the shared power & responsibility has contributed greatly to our success!
