Before a company is incorporated, there is no company to own anything. So who owns the product, the code, the designs, the brand?
By default, the person who created it does.
Each founder personally owns the intellectual property they individually create, unless they have signed something that assigns it elsewhere. This is one of the most dangerous and least understood gaps in early startups.
The departing developer problem
Picture a technical cofounder who writes the entire codebase, then leaves after a disagreement. If they never assigned their IP to the project, they may legally still own that code. The company they left behind is now built on intellectual property owned by someone who walked out the door.
If no one assigned the IP to the project, the project may not actually own the thing it was built to sell.
The covenant to assign
The fix is a covenant to assign: a clause in which every founder agrees that all IP they create for the project belongs to the project (and will be formally transferred to the company on incorporation). This keeps the product with the team, not with whichever individual happened to write it.
The same logic applies to assets and access — domains, repositories, cloud accounts, and credentials. These should belong to the project, not sit permanently under one founder's personal account.