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The Co-Founder Equity Script for Two Students Still in School

The conversation about how to split equity between two founders is one of the more consequential conversations of the early startup years, and it is one of the ones most often postponed until the postponement itself becomes the problem. Two students building together will often work for months without ever formally agreeing on how ownership of the company will be divided, and by the time they finally have the conversation they have already accumulated enough asymmetries betwe

How to Hire Your First Person When You Cannot Really Pay Them Yet

The most important shift in mindset is to stop thinking of the first hire as an employee and start thinking of them as someone who is joining a venture, since the person you can attract without much money is almost never the same kind of person who would take a paid role at a bigger company. Their motivation for joining you is different, and if you understand what that motivation actually is you can structure an arrangement that works for both of you.

Building Systems Before You Think You Need Them

There is a predictable moment in the life of an early company, usually somewhere between the twelfth and the eighteenth month, when the work that had been running smoothly on the founder memory begins to slip out of reach. Magnific.com Customer requests get answered late or not at all, important conversations are forgotten because no one wrote them down, decisions are made twice because the original decision was never recorded, and the founder, who had felt in control of the

The Case for Boring Startups

Most startup writing celebrates the dramatic ideas. The article about the founder who built an AI breakthrough in a garage, the founder who reimagined a category that had not been touched in decades, the founder whose product made the news for being shocking, novel, or strange, all of these tend to dominate the public stories of what entrepreneurship looks like. Magnific.com The result is that student founders, who read these stories at the start of their own work, come away

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What Student Founders Get Wrong About Networking

Most early advice about networking is built for people in formal professional settings, and it reflects the rhythm of a working life that student founders do not yet have. The advice tells you to attend industry events, to maintain a list of contacts, to follow up on every interaction within a week, and to position yourself in ways that make you memorable to future hiring managers. Magific.com None of this is wrong for the audience it was written for, but the audience is rare

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Why Follow Your Passion Is Poor Startup Advice

Few pieces of advice are repeated as confidently or as uncritically as the suggestion to follow your passion when starting a company, and although the phrase is meant kindly and is sometimes useful, it tends to lead student founders into companies that do not survive their first eighteen months for reasons that the advice itself helped create. The problem is not that passion is bad for a startup, since passion does meaningful work over the long arc of building a company, but

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The Quiet Cost of Building While Still in School

Most articles about student founders skip the part that no one talks about at the demo days, because the articles describe the wins, the funding rounds, the early customers, and the moment a professor told the founder they should drop out, while quietly leaving out what gets traded away to make those moments possible. This piece is about the trades, and it is for the student who is building something while taking classes and is starting to wonder why everyone around them look

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