I'm curious about equity splits that are unequal, but not woefully lopsided, eg. Microsoft's 66/33 split, YouTube's roughly 45/45/10 split, or Apple's 45/45/10. Do they have similar problems? It seems like the 45/45/10 split does - Ron Wayne left Apple, and Jawed Karim seems to have been a bit of a loose cannon at YouTube (uploading all the copyrighted content) and hasn't worked with the other YouTube founders since. But then - maybe those partnerships would've foundered anyway? Reddit's equal split between it and Infogami didn't really work out either. Are there any companies out there that have succeeded with 60/40 or 65/35 splits, or 40/30/30 between 3 cofounders?
Honestly, looking at the history of startups, it seems like it really is "growth solves all problems". Startups that have users who desperately want them can survive single founders (PlentyOfFish, Instacart), a 90/10 equity split (Netscape), one founder who screws the others out of equity (Facebook, Microsoft), founders who barely know their cofounders (Parse, Dropbox), founders who break the law (IBM, YouTube, Zenefits, Uber), founders who quit (Apple), founders who bow out (Uber, EBay), all the way up to founders that split shares equally and give a bunch of shares to professors & classmates (Google).
Honestly, looking at the history of startups, it seems like it really is "growth solves all problems". Startups that have users who desperately want them can survive single founders (PlentyOfFish, Instacart), a 90/10 equity split (Netscape), one founder who screws the others out of equity (Facebook, Microsoft), founders who barely know their cofounders (Parse, Dropbox), founders who break the law (IBM, YouTube, Zenefits, Uber), founders who quit (Apple), founders who bow out (Uber, EBay), all the way up to founders that split shares equally and give a bunch of shares to professors & classmates (Google).