I have a start-up with 2 partners.  One year in.  All 3 of us have been full-time on development.  Pre-revenue.  One more person has planned to join us since initial planning began with the plan to be 25% equal split.  The three existing partners put in $20k each, no salaries paid.  Q1: What would be…

My wife and I are thinking of starting the entrepreneurship journey.  We have a great idea (SaaS in LegalTech), we’ve done market research, we’ve talked to potential clients, and we’re about to hire a developer to create an MVP.  Currently, we both have full-time jobs.  We live in a very high-cost city, have over $3k…

The investment he has put in to the company has gone in to his directors loan to be paid back to him through the company but he also requested he was paid the same wages as me and my business partner from his first day of investment. Is this normal? He’s basically getting 30% of…

Not sure how to phrase things (or maybe I’m asking the wrong questions), but I’ll ask it anyway to at least get the conversation started. On Feb 2, I joined as the CTO of a 2yr old startup that had very limited tech capabilities. On April 2, the CEO called me into his office and…

So I just noticed the insane amount of “total compensation” of programmers these days. From 200K for fresh grads to 500K at Facebook for Sr Software Engineers. At that rate you’d easily clear 1M in over 4 years which is the median time it takes for any company to be successful. If you were a…

This question is for software devs who have had multi-year employment gap  & returned back to employment after the gap.  I am wondering if you had to pad your resume with fake experience or what approach did you take to get employed again after a multi-year gap? After more than 5 years working as a…

I have an extensive background in Sales / Sales Mgmt / Management / Bus. Dev. / Operations and want to work for a startup. I’m not a 20-something, but want to be part of a company ready to grow.  How do I position myself to be looked at as a viable contributor rather than someone…

In the process of launching a retail business. So far, I have done all the paperwork, research, marketing, accounting, social media/account setup and paid for all the inventory and supplies. My co-founder seemed to really want this business until we actually got started. She’s on the LLC with me, but now the state is saying…

We’re 2 years old with a team of 10(3 co-founders and the rest 7 engineers). Being a CTO, the majority of my time goes into dealing with tech projects and their timelines, directing the team to align with the product vision and execute it- I am good at this and have been delivering projects mostly…

I had five businesses that were very interested in partnering with my startup they just needed to see more on pricing … I sent them it and then no response. I let it go for two weeks and then emailed with a follow-up and still no response. How do you get people to just respond…

My husband started an AI tech startup a year ago and over this period I’ve had little visibility into how it’s all going. He has been building an app during this time and has been telling me that I’m trying to take over his business (although I have absolutely no knowledge of AI) because I…

I have a great product but I don’t have to financial ability to launch or run a pilot project. I don’t know whether to approach investors because I feel they would want to see some traction at least, which I don’t have. Is there anyway to convince them without having launched?

I’m the CEO of a startup and have been approached by a near competitor, also a startup, to join their team.  The competitor seems to need my skills and those of my team, but my startup is too far along for me to agree simply to bring our team over.  Is there a way to…

First of all, my organization is really informal and there are no legal material or formal agreements and no one has money invested in it. It probably doesn’t qualify as a startup, at least not yet. All 4 founders are full-time students with no idea what we’re doing. We hold an annual show for young…

I’m CTO of a small fintech startup.  We raised a decent amount of seed funding, enough runway for most of next year, and the product launches next month. We have enough financial runway to break even and start building positive cashflow, in theory. I feel like we should be talking to follow on investors and…

I am a single founder (non-tech). We have a great product, that clients are lining up to buy and everyone except engineers seem to understand and are passionate about it. We are profitable already but for 4 years I’ve been fighting with the engineers over features, processes etc. We had engineers that lied to me, tried…

I live in Spain, and there are no private accelerators. The local government is in deals with some international accelerators to install them in a building to operate and connect startups with an international network. I think that should be done by someone local who better knows the entrepreneurs, angels … networks, etc. I feel…

A new manager asked for an external assessment of our software for scalability and sustainability for next investment round.. I’m the technical co-founder (very few equities though), we are only 3 developers and I’m still very involved in programming. I’m probably more like the lead engineer than a CTO. We are in the 5th year,…

We’ve been building this startup for the past two years. We’re bootstrapped and everything was built with our own money and re-invested profits. Life was difficult and for the better half of this year we’ve had many arguments and differences of opinion, but ultimately always moved forward. Now they’re offering a share buyout and bonus…

On one side, one of my friends wants to invest some money in my start-up, and on the other side we have started discussions with a business angel. Both amounts are obviously not the same and I do not believe their equity share should be the same “mathematical” formula. Any tip on how to treat…