Why do startups fail because of co-founder conflict?

it’s what we have done for all of my startups, and what we almost always recommend at YC: equal equity splits among co-founders. - Michael Seibel

  • Here Michael Seibel is the CEO and a partner at Y Combinator, Y Combinator has seen more than ~1,500 startups go through it's program (companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Dropbox, Cruise, DoorDash, Reddit, Docker, Gitlab, Twitch, Mixpanel etc,) additionally Michael Seibel founded Justin.tv a.k.a Twitch. If there is anyone that knows what works and what doesn't sheerly because of mass amount of startup experience he would definetly be qualified.

Now of course there is going to be tons of exceptions in terms of equity splits but generally they should be equal because it promotes an equal respect and contribution towards the startup, the moment you have large differences in equity is the moment the smaller equity co-founder will start to harbour resentments down the line when both co-founders are contributing equal amounts of work yet one has substantially more equity and power in the company. 51/49 is fine that's practically equal but when I say 'unequal' i'm more referring to 35/65 split or anything worse

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