The idea means nothing without the execution. Generally, cofounder split is based on risk taken during the forming of the enterprise and on responsibility. It sounds like your friend wants to do nothing.

I can’t stress this enough: this is not a good look. You barely just started this business relationship and it already looks like your friend will be dead weight forever. It also sounds like she may not even want to build this at all, given she isn’t doing anything.

I see 2 scenarios: 1) if your friend had the idea, she gets a minority cofounder stake but if you’re going to execute, you split the remainder with the CTO (and get a CTO who will also be cofounder) or my favorite: 2) you run for your life and get out of this situation because this is bound for disaster.

No, no, SAFEs are the standard now for a pre-equity round. This investor is just BSing.

When thinking about what to do in this situation, analyze the ROI from the company perspective and consider yourself an employee of the company.

What’s the priority of the company right now? If you hired yourself right now to accomplish that goal, what would you want that employee to do?

In this case, the priority is proving demand and proving product market fit. I’d say: use whatever means at your disposal to get an MVP out that you can use to test your hypotheses with and talk to users. As you make progress and raise money/get revenue, you can hire an engineer to slowly replace that MVP with a more scalable solution.

Not for a seed founder salary; $250k is too high.

No and no. It’s never a negotiation point with VCs (or at least it shouldn’t be), and also $250k is ridiculously high.

I don’t want to be discouraging, but as others have mentioned, your expectations are bit too high for the situation you guys are in. Also, you haven’t mentioned the equity split, which is a factor here.

As a founder, you should pay yourself just enough to not be worried about it. You don’t want to be distracted by not being to pay bills but you also don’t want to take money that could be spent hiring talent and growing the company. The idea is that you forego your salary market expectations in exchange for something that could be much bigger.