Information on Founding Teams

Data on Founders

Our knowledge of whom to found your company with is changing rapidly, as discussed in the book. My research with Jason Greenberg on the relative success of solo founders can be found here . This paper on age and founding suggests that older founders may be more successful.

Diversity and Innovation on Teams

One of the most careful studies on founding team diversity concluded: " We find that broad access to information by virtue of having top management team members that have worked for many different employers (diverse prior company affiliations) and have diverse prior experiences (functional diversity) tend to be associated with positive outcomes." This is a general discussion  of some of the types of diversity on teams and their impact. Finally, gender diversity on founding teams is also linked to innovation and students startup teams with close to 50/50 gender splits seem to do best.

Founder Equity, Vesting, and Legal Agreements

There is no one way that is proven to be best in dividing equity, you should pick an approach that everyone agrees is fair.  One option is to use some system that someone else developed, which can make it feel more objective.  One approach is to use the system outlined in the book Slicing Pie  which claims to be "the only fair way to divide equity" (it isn't), but at least provides one potential framework.  You can download a spreadsheet to help here,  and here is a bit of data  on founder salaries.

Here is a good guide  on how to consider issues of vesting for founder stock.  It also reintroduces the terms, if you wanted to learn more.

To see an actual founding agreement (with legal annotations) and a discussion guide, see this amazing document from Penn Law. The guide is helpful for considering known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns.