1. The Conversation You Skipped At the Kickoff

73% of founding teams split the equity within their first month.

That number comes from Noam Wasserman and Thomas Hellmann, who studied more than 3,700 founders across 1,300 startups and found that dissatisfaction with the split grows as the company matures. Twenty minutes and four questions this week will keep you out of that statistic.

Let’s say you met a co-founder at the Kickoff on September 3 (hopefully). By October there could be a repo, a logo, and a shared Drive folder. Nobody will say the word equity out loud, because saying it feels like accusing a friend of planning to leave.

Robin Chase and Antje Danielson agreed to split Zipcar 50/50 within days of their first conversation over coffee. Chase went at it full time. Danielson kept her position at Harvard and contributed around it. Nothing in the agreement allowed for that difference. Chase eventually went to the board for hiring and firing authority, and Danielson was fired in January 2001. Avis bought Zipcar for about $500 million in 2013. The company worked. The handshake is the part that broke.

Michael Seibel at Y Combinator argues that small differences in year one rarely justify large differences in years two through ten, and that close to equal splits keep founders motivated through the stretch when nothing is working yet.

The percentage gets all the attention. The schedule attached to it does the protecting.

Standard founder vesting is four years with a one-year cliff. Nobody owns their shares outright on day one. At twelve months a quarter is earned, and the rest accrues monthly after that. Leave before the cliff and you keep nothing.

On a campus this matters even more. People leave for reasons that have nothing to do with the company. A co-op in Michigan. A semester in Madrid. A full-time offer in March with a signing bonus and a start date. Graduation removes co-founders from teams on a published schedule that you can look up in advance.

Without vesting, the roommate who drifts off in November still owns a third of the company in April. Baylor's New Venture Competition asks teams to document their cap table. Investors ask sooner than that. A large stake held by someone who stopped showing up is the detail that ends those conversations early.

So have the conversation this week, and ask four things.

•     How many hours a week are you putting in between now and December?

•     What happens to your role in May?

•     What would make you walk away from this?

•     When we disagree and cannot resolve it, who decides?

Write the answers in one document, along with the split, the vesting schedule, and who owns which decision. I am not a lawyer and that document is not a legal filing. It is a record of what everyone agreed to while everyone still agreed, and it becomes the instruction sheet for whoever files your paperwork later.

You will feel awkward for about ten minutes. Everything after that gets easier.

So send your co-founder one message today: "Can we take twenty minutes this week to write down the split and what happens if one of us leaves?" Put the four questions in the invite so nobody walks in cold. If you are still building alone, save this. The week you find someone is the week you need it.

Write it down while you still agree.

Written by Nishant Nair

2. Founder Opportunities (Heading 2)

1. Burton D. Morgan Venture Concept Competition (BEST Opportunity) Deadline: September 27, 11:59pm; Best for: Any Purdue student with a concept. $100,000 pool, workshops at the HIVE starting September 24, final on December 11. Apply: business.purdue.edu/burton-d-morgan

2. Grainger Engineering Tech Startup Challenge  Deadline: September 14 (register); Best for: Technical teams ready to pitch investors. Up to $200,000 in SAFEs, live at the Chicago Venture Summit on October 19 and 20; Apply: https://landuyt.illinois.edu/programs/tech-startup-challenge

3. Baylor New Venture Competition 2027  Deadline: October 1, 11:59pm CST; Best for: Teams of two to four with a real entity. Two page executive summary now, more than $200,000 in prizes at the April finals.Apply: https://hankamer.baylor.edu/baugh-center/new-venture

4. Y Combinator Early Decision  Deadline: rolling;  Best for: Students who want funding now and a batch spot held until after graduation. Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/early-decision

5. Purdue Innovates Firestarter (Fall cohort)  Deadline: September 13; Best for: Founders planning to start a company in the next 3 to 9 months. Seven weeks, Tuesdays at the HIVE, kickoff September 22.Apply: https://purdueinnovates.org/incubator/firestarter/

Sources:

Wasserman & Hellmann, Harvard Business Review | HBS Working Knowledge: How to Sink a Startup | Y Combinator: Co-Founder Equity Mistakes to Avoid | Michael Seibel: How to Split Equity Among Co-Founders | Zipcar