How to Split Equity Among Co-Founders

When I search the web on this topic I often see horrible advice, typically advocating for significant inequality among different founding team members. We see this trend reflected in the thousands of applications we review at Y Combinator every year.

Here are some of the most often cited reasons for unequal equity splits:

• I came up with the idea for the company
• I started working n months before my co-founder
• This is what we agreed to
• My co-founder took a salary for n months and I didn’t
• I started working full time n months before my co-founder
• I am older/more experienced than my co-founder
• I brought on my co-founder after raising n thousands of dollars
• I brought on my co-founder after launching my MVP
• We need someone to tie-break in the case of founder arguments