What was the nurse doing? Ideas aren't worth 65% of the company alone.
I don't know if it's intentional but it seems like a lot of people here are talking as if there were "rules", like "x% is fair, y% is unreasonable". There are rules of thumb. But compensation is a marketplace. If the founder has no leverage, taking a lower stake in exchange for salary isn't honorable. It's just stupid.
Both parties need to feel like they're getting a square deal. If either of them don't, it doesn't work.
I raised the funding, performed the market research, liased with many different health organisations, classifed the information in the database, wrote all the copy for the app, and created the interface mockups working with a designer.
* Maybe you really did do a majority stake's worth of work, and she was just inexperienced.
* Maybe you didn't really do a majority stake's worth of work, and she felt like she had gotten shafted. You did start her at 6%.
* Maybe she was just a bad employee and a crap dev and wanted the paycheck. You weren't experienced enough to notice and fire her.
* Maybe through no fault of her own the project became untenable (for instance, maybe the spec changed a bunch of times, or you couldn't hammer out a reasonable set of features to launch on --- this has happened to us lots). You ran out of money, and she couldn't stay, good faith or not.
It doesn't matter what the nurse was doing, the developer was getting paid a good amount of money.
If I was hired to do a project, and my payment was inline with my market value, I wouldn't care what my employer is doing as long as I kept getting my money.
$6900/m sounds like market value to me. If I was in the nurses position, I would have offered 1% equity on top of $6900/m
It doesn't matter what the nurse was doing OR how much the developer was getting paid. The developer agreed to the terms upfront (and I'm hoping there was some kind of contract involved). Renegotiating or asking for a raise is one thing, but this sounds a bit too much like blackmail to me.
I doubt anyone would consider it blackmail in the legal sense. But I'm putting myself in the owner's place: upfront contract, month 4 of 6, more equity promised upon receiving a deliverable. Losing the developer is a major setback for my startup, and the developer threatens me with creating this setback unless I give a large amount of equity. I would certainly feel that the developer is trying to take advantage of me at that point.
Like I said, it's one thing to negotiate better compensation, or to walk away for a better offer, etc. It's another to say "I can screw you over and I will use that to get more from you".
And like I also said, there are two sides to every story. This is seen exclusively from the owner's side.
I don't know if it's intentional but it seems like a lot of people here are talking as if there were "rules", like "x% is fair, y% is unreasonable". There are rules of thumb. But compensation is a marketplace. If the founder has no leverage, taking a lower stake in exchange for salary isn't honorable. It's just stupid.
Both parties need to feel like they're getting a square deal. If either of them don't, it doesn't work.