Found+READ: Comments by Bill Hildebolt

Bill Hildebolt — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 14:02:05 GMT

This looks fabulous. Just two weeks ago I started chronicling lessons from our experience…must be in the air. Glad to see someone who can really make it happen take center stage. Our posts to date are here:
http://blog.expotv.com/category/life-as-a-start-up

Bill Hildebolt — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:59:18 GMT

In response to Aydin, co-founders rarely have vesting schedules between themselves prefunding. There are a couple of issues with doing this: 1) typically, vestingis something the VCs want but founders don’t. If you do it to yourselves, you’ll never get away from it once the VCs enter the picture & it won’t deter them from even trying to take away from whatever you’ve already vested on your schedule, 2) this will send troubling signals to the VCs. They will legitimately wonder if you did it because you weren’t sure whether one of you was going to stick around. But that is counter to the core of being a founder…which is your absolute commitment to the business until the business no longer needs you. If the VCs believe that that commitment doesn’t exist, the credibility of the entire team will suffer and they will (justifiably) exploit it to your disadvantage. BTW – if a potential founder doesn’t have that commitment, make them the first employee with a slug of options that vest without a cliff…not a founder. Other differences between founders, such as centrality of the skillset or expected roles should preferably be dealt with through the AMOUNT of equity distributed to each, not through a vesting schedule. This deserves more explanation but when a founder without vesting does decide to leave, often it gets dealt with through a lot of peer pressure to sell back a portion or all of their shares. Hope it helps. And to Babak and Naval, great article.

Bill Hildebolt — Thu, 17 May 2007 15:47:21 GMT

Juan, I think you are possibly selling yourself short. If you are truly passionate about your job, a second passion isn’t going to be a put-off at a start-up with a good culture. We all have other commitments (like, sleeping) so passion shouldn’t be defined by the hours worked but by the dedication to do what needs to be done. That’s most easily measured by time spent but needs to translate into results to truly be meaningful.

Luke, this was a great post & very true. For those interested in this topic, I did a complementary post (http://blog.expotv.com/2007/05/08/who-should-your-first-h…) a couple of weeks ago on my company’s blog about the need to find people who leverage one’s own skillset (which can be defined many ways).