The market rate for engineering skills is far greater than marketing or biz dev for similar career stages. If anything, OP has more leverage there.

However, I don’t recommend considering skills in cofounder equity negotiation - it’s unhealthy and pits cofounders against each other. Both cofounders should trust the other can carry their weight.

Sometimes proven pedigree/experience is relevant (i.e. a former exec at big company or a major accomplishment) but only if it’s very concrete.

Yes. All factors should be considered. I wouldn’t assume OP couldn’t “drive the business forward” on his own if he chose to.

23% is a hefty stake in any startup. But what matters more is balance: what you bring vs what you brings.

Here’s a helpful approach: start with 50/50 as if you were equal cofounders and work backwards from there based on what more he is bringing.

For example, he’s got clients, that could be valuable for sure. Is it worth giving himself 27% additional equity? Probably, depends on the clients.

Go to college, study the forefront of science, arts and industry.

Starting a startup is often not interesting. Most are moderately successful boring B2B SAAS.

If you can, learn how to build the next Oculus or OpenAI

Build a search engine. Call it something like Zoogle. Once our ad business gets rolling, start logistics service for delivering anything over the internet purchased via our ad platform. Then start a cloud base web services operation.

Sounds like the problem you need to solve is being “…extremely dependent on getting lots of users…”

I’m assuming you’re trying to build a marketplace. Do not build a marketplace. Instead, just serve user needs. One. At. A. Time.

Then go from there. If a marketplace emerges organically, cool. Otherwise, prepare to manually curate and promote.

Many marketplace apps fail cause they think they need to get a bunch of user generated content to make the market place feel alive. They often under invest in native content, manual content.

Read up on the early days of AirBnB. The company themselves realized the listings needed better photos so they went door to door to photograph the listings themselves. Even today, AirBnB invest directly in featured listings. They build houses in some cases.

GOAT famously manually created their early sneaker deal listings and still do a huge amount of curation.

Sometimes the CEO’s goal isn’t to make the company succeed. Sometimes the goal is to just stay on top.

One challenge is that startup clients wouldn’t intend to stick with you. They eventually want their own team.