Every week, the same debate replays somewhere: the technical founder writes the code, so the technical founder deserves the bigger slice. What does the business person even do this early?
I met the aftermath of that debate in my case files, and here is the pattern worth knowing before you have it: the resentment switches sides over time. In month six, the technical founder seethes ("I built everything, he tweets"). In year two, it is often the other founder's turn ("I closed every customer, he maintains a feature"). Both are reacting to the same underlying mistake.
The mistake is pricing a snapshot instead of an arc.
The asymmetry nobody prices in
Technical contribution is front-loaded and visible. In the first ninety days, the product either exists or it does not, and one person made it exist. Everything the technical founder does leaves an artifact you can point at.
Commercial contribution is back-loaded and, early on, nearly invisible. Positioning, the first ten customer conversations, the distribution experiments that fail before one works, the round that takes five months of groundwork: none of it leaves an artifact in month three. Then the company starts to live or die by exactly those things, every single day, for years.
The product is built once. The company is sold every day.
Split equity on the ninety-day snapshot and you have systematically overpriced the visible work and underpriced the invisible work. Not because code does not matter, but because a four-year deal was priced on a one-quarter picture.
The honest questions, in order
Skip "who is technical" and ask what actually drives a fair split:
Who is full-time, and who carries which risk? A full-time non-technical founder is contributing more risk than a nights-and-weekends technical one, whatever the commit history says.
What would each contribution cost to replace? Run the mercenary test both ways: what would hiring this person's output cost on the market, and could the company survive replacing them? The answers are usually more symmetric than the debate assumes, and they change over time, which is the point.
What is each founder's contribution in years two through four? The split pays mostly for the future. If the honest answer is "the technical founder builds v1 then maintains, the other founder sells forever," the naive split is backwards. If the honest answer is "the product IS the company and distribution is a checkout page," the technical premium is real. Most companies live between the two.
Is anyone bringing priced assets? A working prototype, a patent, an existing audience: those get valued as contributions, separately from the role debate.
The machinery matters more than the number
Whatever split those questions produce, two mechanisms keep it fair over time. Vesting with a cliff, so the split tracks who actually stays and builds. And written roles with a decision-making rule, so "what does he even do" has a written answer before it becomes a grievance.
Before incorporation, all of this is intended equity, which is exactly when the arc conversation is cheap. Have it now, write it down, and revisit it at incorporation with real information instead of month-three emotions.