Fair Ownership

I ran into a problem on a startup I am working on with three partners.

We were trying to decide how equity should be split, but every approach felt arbitrary. You pick numbers once, lock the cap table, and then hope contributions stay roughly aligned.

In reality they rarely do.

One person might put in more hours. Someone else invests cash. Another person might bring the first real revenue. Over time the original split can stop reflecting what actually happened.

So I built a small system for our team to track contributions and calculate ownership from them.

Partners log things like:

• hours worked
• cash invested
• revenue generated
• expenses covered

Those inputs convert into contribution “slices”, and ownership is calculated from the total slices each partner has accumulated.

A few things the system also handles:

• Dead equity detection when someone stops contributing
• Activity ledger of all contributions
• Shareable scenario calculator to model splits before committing
• Cap table freeze once the team agrees the split is final

We are already using it internally on our project with four partners.

I made a public version because this seems like a problem almost every early team eventually runs into, and I plan on using it myself. A lot.

Curious how other founders deal with the “equity drift” problem once real contributions start diverging.

Quick calculator version:
https://fairownership.com/calculator

Full system:
https://fairownership.com