Leave early, leave with nothing

The day’s structural work was the contract with the investor ▸ 4:50, and the clause worth a diary entry came from the investor himself ▸ 5:33: vesting, a word he half-translates and fully explains. Anyone who leaves before completing the first year gets no shares in the company ▸ 6:08, selling them back for a symbolic 10,000 pesos to be split among those who stay ▸ 6:39. Survive the year and a third of your stake is locked in, with the rest accruing day by day until year three ▸ 6:56. He runs the arithmetic for a 30% partner: out before year one, nothing; after year one, 10%; year two, 20%; year three, everything ▸ 7:29.

que nadie sienta que trabaja para un fantasma →

The rationale is the part he likes: the clause pushes the three of them to stay, and if someone doesn’t, nobody feels they spent a year working for the absent one ▸ 7:52. The cautionary example is close at hand, an acquaintance whose company still carries socios who do nothing but remain on the cap table, which he sums up as “termina siendo feo” ▸ 8:09. Signing it now, before there is anything to fight over, is the point: everyone on the same page, rules of the game understood ▸ 8:28.

The survival stipend gets its own guardrail in the same document: the million-peso monthly auxilio stops for anyone who takes outside work and stops being full-time ▸ 8:55. It’s the same philosophy at a smaller denomination: money follows presence, equity follows time, and both are written down while everyone is still friends. Julia’s review of the draft was one line, “me pareció bien” ▸ 8:18, which is what a clause looks like when it arrives before the conflict instead of after…