The Early Bird Gets the Pie
One initial concern that I get about Slicing Pie is the fear that founders won’t get enough of the pie even though they were there during the beginning. Most people assume that the earlier you join a start-up the more risk you are taking and the more reward you should receive. Therefore, early participants should receive a higher proportion of the pie than later participants. This may not always be true, sometimes early risk is quite low because nobody has invested anything but spare time which isn’t the same thing and leaving your job a working full time, but I digress. This concern...
Read MoreSlicing Pie: A Guide to Dividing Up Early-Stage Start-up Equity
First Published on Tech Cocktail (Tech.co) Not long ago, I was approached by one of my students at Northwestern, who was distraught over a situation in a fledging company that she had started in my entrepreneurship class. Her group had decided to split the equity in her company equally – 25 percent each. Now that the class was over, the other three partners weren’t pulling their weight. Two of them were pretty much out of the picture, and the third was only doing a little. However, all of them wanted to keep their share of the equity or sell it at an unreasonable price. The student was on...
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