If it is just you 2 and you aren’t paid, it should be closer to 50/50, but really it depends on the work needed at the moment. It will get diluted with funding eventually.
But it also matters if he has put money into the company and you haven’t, etc.
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.
DM me. I am looking for some freelance work. Over 15 years professional experience as fullstack dev and about 4 running an entire department.
Looking for something to get me back into coding more rather than dealing with leadership, clients, and management.
I’ve also had startup 2 businesses as lead tech cofounder.
I typically start with scoping, then a paid audit, then paid rescoping. Everything is documented in case you don’t want to use me and can use those scoping docs for future devs.
My pricing works like this:
I give a base estimate, this the minimum you would pay
I give a median, which is around more what you would pay.
I give a high estimate, which is based on a risk percentage, which further scoping can bring down. However, I give this number or client budgeting. You will never be charged higher than the high estimate, because then it is a “me” issue not being able to estimate correctly.
During the rescoping process, I typically try to get that risk below 40% per component.
Having been in this situation, it led to a merger and growing our company something like 2000% in 2 years.
It was the most worth-while meeting I had especially compared to investors who just want a hand in the deal and nothing else.