To give a background, I am working on startup for the past 6 months full time. Within the last 4 months, we I have assembled a team of 4 more people as co-founders except all of them are working part-time. We had divided up the founders pie in the order of 40-15-15-15.
One of the team members were working a lot at the beginning, but lately have been performing extremely poorly and outputting very bad quality, and this is becoming a big problem for the rest of the team.
How can we let go of a team member, and how would compensation work (since letting him leave with 15% ownership is not fair for the current team, and letting him leave with 0% is not fair for his contributions).
How does this work? Any experience with such situations? This is a really nasty situation, please help.
This is the reason for vesting ownership shares, so that the people earn their shares over time, rather than all being divided up at the beginning.
I had a similar issue with a friend I brought on as co-founder. Thankfully he was 'stolen' away by another company, so that resolved the issue of his involvement, and I very candidly brought up the issue of ownership ,as he was around for such a short period of time, and we hadn't reached enough milestones to match the value of the amount he would have owned via the vested ownership. We worked out a smaller percentage which we both thought was more fair based on what he had accomplished in his short time.
If this guys head/heart were and are in the right place, he'll want to work with you on what is best for the company. If not, then you may have to get some legal advise.
But I would first talk to him about the issues, and see if the team can resolve it.