How Yova's founding team used slicing pie and why
Being one of the inspirational success stories of Zurich based startups, Tillmann Lang, the CEO of Yova, kindly agreed to share his cofounding wisdom with us. This includes insights on how his team in the early stages benefited from using the slicing pie methodology.
Yova’s CEO Tillmann Lang
About Tillmann
For many years, Tillmann has been working on the question of how to make the world more sustainable – and the role finance has in this transition. Before founding Yova, Tillmann worked for more than 6 years at the strategy consultancy McKinsey & Company. In addition, Tillmann was CFO of Benefiit, a network of impact investors and is founding director of the Sustainability-in-Business-Lab of ETH Zurich. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich and studied mathematics and computer science at the universities of Heidelberg and Santiago de Chile. In his free time Tillmann enjoys skiing, mountain biking and other outdoor activities.
About Yova
Invest for a better world. There is hardly a more effective way to vote for a change in the world than with your money - with its value proposition Yova opens to opportunity to invest to ‘normal invidivduals” which is also aligned to their values while promising standard market returns (‘to meet the market’).
Tillmann’s cofounding wisdom
Was Yova your first startup?
I have been having few entrepreneurial activities before, but Yova was my first serious startup commitment - all in.
How did you choose your cofounders?
Each cofounder came with a clear contribution - from the idea to expertise and execution to network. Most I knew for a long time as friends and with Erik - we have also worked together at ETH before. One of the most important criteria for me was that we were aligned on the values.
How and when did you allocate roles?
Some roles were clear early on based on the available commitment and contribution and we also looked of course on the skills, experience and preferences of the founders. Part of the team is dedicated full time and part of the team participates on a part time basis. Split of responsibilities between the full time founders evolved over time and still does. Staying flexible is important.
How did you split the equity?
From the start we tried to allocate the equity based on the founders contribution and commitment (idea, time…). It took a while to get the right feel for it and for the discussion we found the slicing pie methodology very useful. With combining the retrofit (past contributions) with the forecast (what do we think the founders will contribute in the future) it gave us a useful starting point.
If you were to summarise the main benefits from using slicing pie, what would that be?
First of all - It is a methodology which is already a great start. It also helps to align on the value of the contributions and allowed us to get a feeling for the different scenarios (for example what happens if I spent double the time).
It also allowed us to align on (what is how important and ingoing assumptions - who contributes what - which is much easier to align on than a stock split where nobody knows what's right.
What is according to you important mindset when it comes to equity split?
You need to have a good spirit and a good faith among cofounders. And while perception of fairness might change over time and it might fluctuate - you need to find a solution that overall you will be able to live with and is in the interest of the company.
With the knowledge of Tillmann today - would you do anything differently?
Not really.
Big thank you to Tillmann for sharing his insights and all the best to all you cofounders out there - wishing you to also have no regrets and to build a successful cofounding team with a fair equity split!