Starting a new company requires inspiring early co-founders to join you in your efforts and then quickly establishing an environment of trust where everyone works hard and fairly shares the upside of any success.
To that end, we’re launching the Seedhack Founder’s Collaboration Agreement (download here) which is designed for a newly formed team to agree on what each founder’s shareholding should be as well as how to make sure that each founder puts a continued effort throughout the lifetime of the company in order to keep their equity stake.
The hope is that this document will not only help events like Seedhack, where collaboration amongst team members is key, but also any ‘back of a napkin at a cafeteria’ brainstormed startups where people put a lot of sweat equity in even before they think about forming a ‘formal’ company.
A big thank you to Tina Baker from Brown Rudnick for drafting the agreement.
Supporting Organizations:
Usage of the document:
Treat this doc as a starting point for discussion. Yes, feel free to use it as-is, as we believe it covers 80% of what you should consider, but feel free to modify it as you and your founding team need to. Also, the items in brackets [ ] are to either be filled in or amended as you see fit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Seedhack Collaboration Founders Agreement by http://www.seedhack.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.seedhack.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.seedhack.com.
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