The Story of Our Failed Startup: Company Structure

This post is part of my story on our failed startup Camargus.

In my previous posts, I've been talking about how we failed at developing and marketing our product. But there were some other, more fundamental issues.

Let’s rewind to the start of Camargus. I co-founded the company with two other parties that were instrumental in the creation of the video stitching technology. We split the equity in three equal parts. My partners were not interested in running the company with me on a day-to-day basis. Their post-founding involvement took the form of company meetings and coaching sessions. My partners were senior and very experienced in their respective domains. But soon Camargus' issues were progressing outside of their comfort zone, from creating and showcasing new technology to developing a product and customers.

We took aboard consultants with the intention of building a more diverse team to tackle the latter. As these consultants were making considerable contributions and were eager to commit themselves full-time, we got into fundamental discussions on how to proceed equity-wise. Unfortunately, we had not foreseen to allocate equity to this end.

People sometimes call non-committed shareholders dead weight, and it’s why startups implement vesting schemes. We had 66% dead weight and no vesting. I don’t mean to marginalize the contributions my partners have made in creating Camargus’ technology. In fact it was huge. But it was not possible to reconcile their interests with the company moving forward.

In the following post, I'll talk about the next phase of the company: taking on investors.