The Founder’s Agreement: 6 conversations every startup team should have early

At our inaugural Co-Founder Matchmaking Event, Jannik Neumann, co-founder of startup Hephaistos and Talent Kick Scout in Basel, shared how his founding team approached this challenge. They used a structured “Founder’s Agreement” – not as a dry legal contract, but as a manifesto of the questions they needed to answer together to build a strong and aligned team. 

Here are the six parts of that agreement and the key questions every founding team should discuss: 

Personal goals and vision: why are we doing this?

The first part of the Founder’s Agreement focuses on something deceptively simple: why each person wants to found a company at all. 

It’s not enough to agree on the product or technology. Founders also need to talk about: 

• What is our shared North Star? 

• When would we consider this company a success? 

• Are we in it for a 7+ year journey, or aiming for an early exit? 

• How do we imagine our lives if things go well? 

As Jannik points out, if one co-founder is dreaming of selling after three years and another wants to work on the company for the next 20 years, you already have built-in conflict potential. 

A Founder’s Agreement forces these topics onto the table early, before they quietly turn into frustration. 

Roles, responsibilities and decision-making: who does what, and who decides?

The second part of the Agreement focuses on roles and responsibilities. Who is responsible for what? How are decisions made? How are conflicts handled? And: what happens when someone leaves? 

These questions become even more important in teams with an even number of co-founders. When votes can easily result in deadlock, you need a clear mechanism for making decisions quickly. 

His team experimented with creative ideas, including a “weighted coin flip” as a last resort. But the real solution came from something less flashy: a structured way to approach decisions through team coaching. When they hit a stalemate, everyone writes down why they hold their opinion and they work through the underlying assumptions together until they find common ground. 

The Founder’s Agreement is the place to capture: 

• Who has which role (e.g. CEO, CTO, business development lead). 

• How key decisions are made (unanimous, majority, veto rights). 

• What your conflict-resolution process looks like. 

• How you handle co-founders leaving or joining, including non-compete or non-solicitation expectations. 

The goal isn’t to predict every scenario. It’s to agree on how you’ll handle them. 

Personal situations: how do we each survive while we build this?

Startups are built by humans with rent to pay, families to support and limited time. The third section of the Founder’s Agreement zooms in on the personal situation of each co-founder. 

Key questions include: 

• How does each of us finance our life right now? 

• Do we have side jobs, studies or other obligations? 

• How many hours per week can each person realistically commit? 

• How long can our personal budget support us while working on the startup? 

• How do we handle the first costs – travel, prototypes, software tools – before outside funding? 

Spelling these things out helps avoid resentment. If one founder is working 80 percent on the startup and living off savings while another is contributing 20 percent effort next to a full-time job, the team needs to acknowledge that imbalance and agree on whether it’s acceptable and how it is reflected in roles or equity. 

Again, the aim isn’t perfection – it’s to align expectations before pressure kicks in. 

Trust and relationships: can we really talk about the hard things?

For Jannik, the most important part of the Founder’s Agreement is trust and relationships. 

Some teams start as friends who already know each other well; others meet through programs and haven’t yet built a deep relationship. In both cases, the agreement encourages founders to reflect honestly on questions like: 

• Have we spent enough time together, both personally and at work? 

• Can we communicate openly, honestly and constructively with each other right now? 

• If not yet, what can we do – more working sessions, even a short trip together – to build that level of trust? 

Jannik is candid about why this all matters: there will be a lot of difficult questions coming. If you can’t speak openly about these topics, you risk bottling things up until they explode into conflict. 

His advice is to invest early in shared experiences that go beyond polite meetings, and explicit agreements on how you give each other feedback, especially when you disagree on strategy or priorities. 

Equity, vesting and investment: how do we share upside and downside?

The fifth section of the Founder’s Agreement deals with the topics that often feel most sensitive: equity, vesting and investment. Here, founders discuss: 

• How is equity shared at the beginning – and why? 

• How do we want to handle adding new co-founders later? 

• What happens if someone leaves – voluntarily or not? 

• Do we want a founder vesting model (reverse vesting), so that co-founders “earn” their shares over time? 

• How do we reflect brought-in IP or major contributions in equity? 

Investors expect that founding teams have thought about vesting and buyback options, because it protects both the company and the remaining founders. 

The Founder’s Agreement doesn’t replace formal legal documents, but it gives the substance for those documents: what you, as a team, consider fair.

Commitment: are we in, and for how long?

The sixth part of the Agreement looks at commitment – not as an abstract “yes or no,” but in concrete terms. Typical questions include: 

• Do any of us have job offers or other backup plans after graduation? 

• Until when do we need to make a final decision between a job offer and the startup? 

• Are we willing to cancel existing backup options at a certain point? 

• What does each co-founder’s commitment timeline look like over the next 6–24 months? 

• What exactly are we committing to: a specific problem, a technology space, this exact team, or a minimum time frame? 

Having honest conversations here is essential. It’s perfectly fine if someone needs to keep a backup option for a while – but the rest of the team needs to know this and understand the implications. 

At some point, though, a startup needs people who are truly “all in.” A Founder’s Agreement can help define when that moment needs to come, so you’re not surprised by someone leaving just when things get difficult. 

There is no recipe – but the conversation is the point 

Perhaps the most important message Jannik leaves founders with is that no framework, including the Founder’s Agreement, can tell you exactly what to do. 

Not every piece of advice will be right for your situation. You will get contradictory feedback from different mentors and investors. That’s normal. Your job as a founding team is to: 

• Prioritize which feedback really matters for your next step. 

• Talk to customers early and validate your assumptions instead of building something in a vacuum. 

• Accept that times will become tough and that a strong, aligned team makes those moments much easier to navigate. 

The Founder’s Agreement isn’t a magic shield against conflict or failure. It’s a structured way to have hard conversations early, so you’re not blindsided later.

A Founder’s Agreement is a powerful tool – but it’s even more effective when you can stress-test your ideas with experienced guides and peers who have been through the journey before. 

If you’re working on an innovative startup and want structured support to refine your team setup, validate your idea and get ready for investors, VentureConnect could be a good next step. The program is designed for founders who are serious about turning their project into a viable company and offers access to experienced mentors, expert input and a sparring partner for the hard questions around roles, equity and strategy. 

Learn more about VentureConnect