Splits among co-founders can be even or not, but they should be discussed openly.

When Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, they split the company 64% to 36%. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, went 50%-50%. Which model should you follow? It depends. You should weigh a variety of factors including circumstances, experience, contributions and roles. Whatever you do, don’t avoid the topic with your co-founders, as that is bound to cause big problems later. We talked to some experts whose advice will help guide what could be awkward conversations about who owns what.

Discussions about how to split a startup’s equity among founders can be emotionally charged – so it’s not surprising that many first-time founders avoid the topic altogether.
Scott Dettmer, a Silicon Valley-based lawyer who has been advising startups since the mid-1990s, sees it all the time: the team settles on an equal equity split because it’s more expedient than a difficult back-and-forth.

“Sometimes we’ll feel more like the group psychologist when we sit down with the founders and say, ‘let’s talk this through,’” says Dettmer, a founding partner at Gunderson Dettmer. “We’ll tell them, ‘Here are some things to consider, here are some ideas for thinking about it.’ Often it ends with them looking awkwardly at one another and saying, ‘Uh, we have some things to talk about, we’ll get back to you.’”

There’s no magic formula for determining the equity split among founders. There’s no correct answer when venture capitalists ask the founding team — as they invariably do — who owns what percentage of the business. VCs seek clear reasoning and transparency about how the equity split is determined.
The one mistake to avoid is showing that you’ve spent almost no time discussing it. It’s an issue that can lead to big problems in a company’s future if not properly aired. Several startup equity calculators can help guide you through the discussions.

Equal or not?
● Equal splits. Whether they are 50-50, 33-33-33 and so on, equal splits remain the most common type of arrangement among startup founders. Dettmer, who has put together many hundreds of ownership deals for emerging companies, figures that just over half fall in that category. “But that means that almost half are not,” he says.
● Junior cofounder. “Sometimes a 50-50 split doesn’t make sense,” Dettmer adds. Over time, you know one will be contributing a whole lot more than the other because of the experience and skills and roles of the different founders.”

The most common scenario for an unequal split is where one founder clearly stands apart from the rest. That founder may have conceived the idea for the company and brought in one or …