I began as a solo founder and I (gladly) accepted a vesting schedule as part of our first money in.
There are very few legitimate reasons that founders shouldn’t be willing to accept vesting schedules for their own ownership — I mean, there’s one: that you believe the value and potential of your company to be so great in a short time horizon that you can get rich quickly and leave within a couple years, and also believe with 100% confidence that the risk to do so is negligible and external factors (market downturn, you name it) will not be able to impede your progress. Call me when you build that company; it’s roughly equivalent to the perpetual motion machine of company-building.
Vesting schedules for founders are standard terms and there are a multitude of reasons they’re standard — as a founder I can give you reasons, and VCs can give you plenty more. As somebody who began a solo founder, there was no intracooperative founder risk to me accepting a vesting schedule and I did so anyway without hesitation, for the reasons I outlined earlier.
Let’s say you launched a company, bootstrapped it to the tune of say $500k, have customers and business, then a VC comes along with “standard terms” trying to put you on a vesting schedule, for your own damn company... what is your response going to be? Quite likely it’s not going to be - “I run it by my legal department and they said Ok”.
There are very few legitimate reasons that founders shouldn’t be willing to accept vesting schedules for their own ownership — I mean, there’s one: that you believe the value and potential of your company to be so great in a short time horizon that you can get rich quickly and leave within a couple years, and also believe with 100% confidence that the risk to do so is negligible and external factors (market downturn, you name it) will not be able to impede your progress. Call me when you build that company; it’s roughly equivalent to the perpetual motion machine of company-building.
Vesting schedules for founders are standard terms and there are a multitude of reasons they’re standard — as a founder I can give you reasons, and VCs can give you plenty more. As somebody who began a solo founder, there was no intracooperative founder risk to me accepting a vesting schedule and I did so anyway without hesitation, for the reasons I outlined earlier.