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Nasir and Matt kick off the week by diving into the topic of partnerships and the important things to remember before forming the partnership. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business legal news. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: And welcome to our program once again. I’ve been trolling Reddit a little bit and it’s just crazy how many times I see the exact same question and story in the startups and entrepreneurs section of Reddit of someone that is starting a business with a partner and it going horribly wrong. It’s, like, pretty much the same story over and over again so I wanted to talk a little bit about partnerships and starting a business with somebody and things like that. MATT: Well, what’s the story that you keep reading? Since you just admitted to being a troll, I want to hear what you’re trolling on. NASIR: Yeah, I guess that’s a negative thing. No, but it’s the same thing. Basically, I think we’ll link the particular Reddit that made me think about it. It’s kind of a long story – long story yet the same story – but I’ll summarize it. Basically, someone is the developer, another person is the business end of things, and they have a startup idea. It really doesn’t even matter what it is. The developer, they say, “Okay, let’s split it up this percentage; you get this percent, I get this percent.” It could be 50-50, it could be 40-60, it doesn’t really matter – they talk about it. And then, the developer works for six, seven months and starts, you know, actually creates the product – a minimum viable product as they say – and then they launch and then they start having discussions about raising funds and things like that and the business guy is just sitting there in the background and kind of doing his thing and, of course, the developer starts to feel that there’s some unfairness here. “Hey, what are you doing in this relationship? You’re just sitting back,” and then they go to get funds and then now this developer is complaining because the business guy came back to him and said, “Okay, here’s a deal, I’m going to give you 25 percent. I’m going to take 50 percent of the company and then the rest is going to go to other investors and things like that, and not only that, your 25 percent is going to start at – I don’t know – 15 percent and vest another 10 percent over the next 36 months or so.” I’m messing up the numbers but that’s basically the bottom-line. And so, now, all of a sudden, the deal that he thought it was is not even close to what it is and, of course, now the paperwork is not as clear. He signed some stuff but didn’t sign other stuff and then, of course, there’s always intellectual property issues. if this is the same story and I read a bunch of them, I think he showed up over Christmas at a family dinner and wanted him to sign an IP assignment which is basically the last thing that he needed on paper to make sure that this deal went through. So, this is a very classic situation. I swear I could retell it over and over again and with different numbers and different positions. But, if you read the comments, the first top comment says, “’Gentleman’s agreement.’ Hey, I found the problem!” So, I thought that was pretty clever. MATT: That could be a female that posted that. I was disappointed that it wasn’t just an agreement. But you’re right; this happens all the time and the best analogy for a business partnership is a marriage. I mean, think of it this way, you wouldn’t just kind of meet someone and get married to them – well, you might. I don’t know. I guess that’s worked before. But your odds are better if you know someone more beforehand and do some due diligence than just jumping into something or setting the terms. I’m probably screwing this up how I’m describing it but it’s definitely something you want to get hammered out sooner rather than later and one of the things, you’re familiar with Startup Weekend,