Lukas Bewald, founder of CrowdFlower, says early-stage founders obsess over keeping 51% ownership when it doesn't matter. Equity shifts as the company grows anyway. What matters is making sure your team feels good about what they own.
I was just going to quote Lukas Bewald, who is the founder and CEO of CrowdFlower, and he sort of famously got kicked out as the CEO and then was brought back. And, you know, we asked him in a recent blog post interview, like, do you think entrepreneurs are too worried about equity and dilution? And he said, this is verbatim, I'm quoting, the most pervasive myth that I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is there's something magical about 51% equity. Or they don't want to go below 50%, and it's totally misguided. If you're running a business for a long time, you're going to do lots of things that change everybody's amounts of equity. So the biggest thing is to make sure that people feel good about where they are and not quibble over 5% or 1%, etc.
