My example:
Day 1: I installed the security cameras in the new office
Day 50: I surveyed customers
Day 200: I wrote all our code
Day 500: I wrote the grant proposals
Day 800: I pitched to investors
Now I have hired people to do all of those things and I mostly just manage them.
Don’t ignore tech completely. The most annoying thing about my co-founder is that he has no understanding of tech in a tech focused business. Don’t get me wrong. His sales expertise is the reason we have any money. His lack of tech knowledge is also the reason he failed to build a good budget to get all the features he wanted. You can take all the finance classes you want, but you’ll never be a good tech CEO if you can’t build financial plans specifically for tech.
We make portable medical refrigerators for blood and organ transport.
I tried connecting with Plug and Play AZ and they ghosted me. Too bad for them though I just finished raising a Series A.
We make refrigerators. I just sold my 375th!
Not one, but two people were accepted to my business school with physically impossible ideas. One wanted to use the pressure at the bottom of the ocean to generate electricity. That’s it. It’s high pressure and so all you do is put a hose at the bottom of the ocean plug it into a turbine and wammo you’ve got infinite free energy.
The other wanted to put turbines inside air conditioning vents not realizing that you would be guaranteed to lose energy in that equation. I actually went to the dean and told him that it’s ideas like this that are the reason people think our school is stupid. He said he agreed, but the student donated a lot of money to get into the school.
I was in the same position as you and took 24%. As a new founder I had no idea what the CEO was going to do while I was writing code, but looking back, I’m glad we split the equity the way we did. My co-founder CEO did some amazing selling and I’m super happy with my 24%. There were actually 4 of us and we split it nearly equally between 2 engineers and two business side. In the old days, I think engineers got less, but more and more we are expected to have more business savvy like CTOs and so you kind of grow into that role and definitely earn your 24%.