Ticketmaster

If you remember the verbal agreement, and there’s a chance you’ll be a founder again, I’d honor the verbal agreement. I agree that a contract is a contract, and you should point out the contract, but, losing an early champion when you have a long future is clearly about more than legalese. I’m guessing the difference in comp that you and your cof take-home is negligable, if you honor the verbal? I’m not rich, but, $450k take home doesn’t sound like life-changing retirement money. You’ll have a future. Up to you whether Investor B is part of that for you.

Simple question to them: what have you done to prove there is a market for the product, the product will be profitable, when, and by how much? If they don’t explain the answers succinctly and eloquently, then they are too early to be looking for a team to build it.

Y Combinator has some excelllent free vids on valuation.

Research 2 sided market place for insights into identifying critical mass.

As a former founder, and national recruiter, this is really close to my heart. Startups are intensely time and energy heavy, with painful learning curves for years. Most startups can’t afford to pay for resources they need, for a long while. Unless you can leverage the startup load, with/against class projects, you’ll be essentially doubling your present workload. It might be worth it to take a few meetings, but, at this stage, don’t get distracted from your personal goals.

A single differentiator is a really risky value prop. Thinking a short while in the future you’d need to ensure that this single value prop isn’t easily duplicated, in order to compete and stay competitive. This sounds like a really rough pitch to future investors.