Founder Equity Split Agreement Template

A percentage is not arguable. It is one number with no visible derivation, so the only two responses available are acceptance and rejection, and both feel personal. Every founder equity conversation that goes badly goes badly at exactly that point. A weighting is arguable: whether pre-incorporation work should count for twice as much as capital is a question three reasonable people can disagree about out loud and then write down. So nothing here produces a percentage until a frame exists.

Tessellate Labs is an invented three-founder company with a 7,200,000 share founder pool. Its founders scored five dimensions, then weighted them privately. Run the same scores through all three weightings and one founder lands at 17.77, 19.62 or 21.81 percent, a band four points wide. Equal shares sits at 33.33 percent, outside all three by more than eleven points, which makes it a choice worth 990,000 shares rather than a default nobody priced.

The other half is the one everyone omits, and the split decides it. A founder resigning at month 14 of a 48 month schedule keeps 411,250 shares under the weighting they adopted, which is 6.63 percent of what remains, or 700,000 shares under equal shares, which is 12.73 percent. Same person, same day, same terms. With no vesting papered at all she keeps a third of the company and does no further work, which is how a team ends up beside a permanent absentee shareholder.