Is being offered 23% of a company an insult as a partner in a start up? I am responsible for building and designing the entire web app, coding the Frontend, backend, and digitizing all requirements for our proof of concept. My partner found me on LinkedIn. Its his idea, he will be running business functions, marketing, client onboarding, and he has a few real clients to do a trial run with. We’ve been working together for two months in a trial period and now we want to write up contract. How do I value myself?! ……This is my first start up !
Your equity should be vested and you can work with the primary investors on deciding what it should be.
If they are acting as the CEO and doing all the pitches, gathering funding, etc. then, yea, they should likely get close to 50%.
If you are building the entire thing, then you should also get close to 50%. However, investors will eat into those percentages, so it would likely be more around 25% for each of you.
But vested equity is setup with importance of roles over time and you can schedule a reinvestment of equities for the team over years. So, if your work is worth 50% now, but will be 25% later, you can start with 25% and it can grow to 50% over 3 years. Same with the CEO.
Also, are you getting paid for this work? That will make a difference on the equity in the company.
It honestly sounds pretty legit and you can probably negotiate, but without more information, it is hard to say.