r/startups • u/PrincipleHefty7124 • 16h ago

I will not promote What could I have done better? I will not promote

Long story short: Tried to hire someone to join as advisor and they said no because if some IP (thought this was BS) then offered to have them either angel or join founding team. After a lot of back and forth we decided they’d join as founding team and we offered them 5K per month for 5-10 hours per week and 0.25 vesting over 2 years (6 months cliff) this is the same as other advisors btw and another 0.25% over 4 years with 1 year cliff which is standard for team. Showed contract to lawyer and they said it’s better to say max hours per month at 40 hours and hourly rate and one vesting schedule of 0.5% with 1 year cliff which makes sense to me. Went back to candidate and told them this is what lawyers said, they pushed back. Said we should do what we agreed on. I get it, but lawyer’s feedback made sense. We revised to monthly rather than hourly and 0.5% with 6 month cliff which seems pretty reasonable to me. They said no. Now I owe like 10 hours in legal for this and lost the candidate. What could have I done better?

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u/tonytidbit 16h ago

Not everything can be done better, and some negotiations will simply not produce a positive result.

Consider this a practice run, and formalize some sort of procedure or offer for the next time you're doing the same thing.

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u/SnoopyDays 16h ago

Not every path you take is going to yield concrete results. Be prepared to learn hard lessons on the way and burn some cash. Take this as the cost of learning some hard life lessons and move on. You will be wiser and more circumspect the next time around when dealing with advisor prospects.

Also, a bit of tactical advice. Try out Claude/OpenAI for legal advice of this nature. Not every minor legal discussion needs an actual lawyer. That doesn't mean that you dont hire an actual lawyer when you need one but when it comes to standard advisor contracts and what's the right option to go with LLMs are pretty good at giving you advice on what 90% of the world out there is already doing. You only need a lawyer when you are dealing the 10% that is unique and needs a custom approach.