New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Broke up with cofounder. Can I use remaining money to pay our devs?
Ask HN: Broke up with cofounder. Can I use remaining money to pay our devs?
7 by anondeveloper | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I worked with my cofounder for 6 months on a B2B product. And we broke up 2 months ago. We only raised 50k from angel investors and still have around 35k of it in the company's account. Over the last 4 months working together, we used overseas contractors to develop the early MVP and product demo. We owe them around 26k for that work. Can I use the remaining company funds to pay them? Under normal circumstances, this would be a no-brainer. But there are some details that can make it trickier. My ex-co-founder has mental health issues I wasn't aware of when we started working together (we met at a founders meetup in SF and he seemed pretty normal by then). I politely decided to stop working with him after finding out and hearing horror stories from mutual connections and his previous employers (lawsuits, threats, etc). After I broke up with him, he became a completely different person: he tried to contact the university I graduated from to get my title revoked, tried to get me fired from my job and tried to forcefully make me sign a contract waiving all my shares, ip and rights to the stuff we both worked on (I didn't sign it). I'm not mentioning this to complain but to paint a picture of a deeply troubled person who will do anything to cause as much damage as possible if things do not go their way. I want to pay our contractors what we owe them, but I am slightly concerned I'll get sued or in any other kind of trouble if I use the remaining funds to do so. My main question is: should I pay them? What is the worst he can do if he disagrees? Can he sue me? Report theft? We don't have any cofounder agreements signed, the only thing we have is the company and the bank account (we were working on the paperwork but never got to sign it). And we don't have signed agreements with our contractors. But, we have a working demo and all the code they delivered. Thank you!
7 by anondeveloper | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I worked with my cofounder for 6 months on a B2B product. And we broke up 2 months ago. We only raised 50k from angel investors and still have around 35k of it in the company's account. Over the last 4 months working together, we used overseas contractors to develop the early MVP and product demo. We owe them around 26k for that work. Can I use the remaining company funds to pay them? Under normal circumstances, this would be a no-brainer. But there are some details that can make it trickier. My ex-co-founder has mental health issues I wasn't aware of when we started working together (we met at a founders meetup in SF and he seemed pretty normal by then). I politely decided to stop working with him after finding out and hearing horror stories from mutual connections and his previous employers (lawsuits, threats, etc). After I broke up with him, he became a completely different person: he tried to contact the university I graduated from to get my title revoked, tried to get me fired from my job and tried to forcefully make me sign a contract waiving all my shares, ip and rights to the stuff we both worked on (I didn't sign it). I'm not mentioning this to complain but to paint a picture of a deeply troubled person who will do anything to cause as much damage as possible if things do not go their way. I want to pay our contractors what we owe them, but I am slightly concerned I'll get sued or in any other kind of trouble if I use the remaining funds to do so. My main question is: should I pay them? What is the worst he can do if he disagrees? Can he sue me? Report theft? We don't have any cofounder agreements signed, the only thing we have is the company and the bank account (we were working on the paperwork but never got to sign it). And we don't have signed agreements with our contractors. But, we have a working demo and all the code they delivered. Thank you!
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