I met my co-founder at the Lisbon meetup. Here is the agreement we signed first

Before Lisbon I had been building Inboxed alone for a year. At the Saturday dinner I sat next to a member who had run deliverability at an email company, and by Sunday we were drawing on a napkin.

Because of every horror story on this forum, we signed an agreement before writing a line of code together. The parts I would recommend to anyone:

• Four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, for both of us, including me on the year I had already done (I got credit for six months, not twelve)
• A written "stop condition": if we are under $2k MRR at 18 months, we both agree to talk about stopping
• Who decides what, in one paragraph
• What happens to the code if one of us leaves

It took two evenings and one very awkward conversation about the six months.

The stop condition. You have no idea how happy this makes me. That is point 4 of my Parcelo post, done properly.

As Colm's former co-founder: we had none of this. We are fine now, but it took a year of not speaking. Do the awkward conversation up front. It is so much shorter.

We are fine.

Not legal advice, but as a general matter this is a very sensible list. I would add what happens to the domain names and the payment account, because those are usually in one person's name.

They were both in mine. Moved to the company last week because of this reply.

You gave up six months of credit to make it fair. That tells me more about how this partnership will go than the rest of the document.

One year on: $2,900 MRR, so we passed the stop condition with six months to spare. Still speaking. Still have the napkin.