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Comment by joshuaellinger | Hacker News Reader

Industry standard is 4 years vesting with a 1 year cliff. You are vesting, right? You should own 8.25% at a year and then 0.6875% for each month after that.

Sometimes there are differences because different founders contributed different amounts. For example, this schedule wouldn't be fair if one of you had a side job.

Ultimately, it won't really matter. If they think you have too much ownership, they can issue themselves additional stock grants to get you down to what they want you at.

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Doesn't apply to cofounders, only to initial hires...

Actually, it's standard for founders to have a vesting schedule, too.

While this might be pertaining to cofounders as well, it's not a rule, whereas it is a rule for first hires. Cofounders can have completely different means to resolve conflicts/departures etc. specified in operating agreements, such as arbitrations etc.

All of the investors I've ever talked to preferred founder vesting over anything else. Maybe we run in different investor circles.

Most investors do, yes. But the investors aren't there to tell founders what to do at the initial incorporation phase, when vesting decisions initially get made. Of course those decisions can be modified when investors come on board, but until that time the founders are typically working with the original vesting structure chosen by the founders.

I'm sure there are some founders who make that mistake, this discussion being one example, but I didn't make that mistake, and the startups I've advised (all first-time founders) didn't make that mistake, you basically won't find any "guide to founding your first startup" on the Internet advocating that mistake. I have a hard time believing that it's common.

I see from your profile that you're a startup attorney, so you probably have seen a LOT more deals than I have, but to a certain extent you probably remember the messed up ones more than the ones that used boilerplate documents.

I've seen a lot of deals...and a lot of messed up deals.

Multi-founder teams with no vesting does happen. I think that's a mistake and advise against it. Things go wrong way more often than people think.

I differ from many folks in that I don't necessarily advocate standard investor-friendly structures (though structures that are easily made investor friendly, yes). But founder vesting is one place where I agree with the standard line - it's really necessary.

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