Why I wrote Founder Fallout
People ask me why I wrote a book about equity. They want a marketing answer. I do not have one.
I wrote it because I have watched four partnerships end. Two of the endings were planned. Two ambushed me. Both times I was the last person in the room to see it coming.
That is the whole reason. Everything else is footnote.
The first one that ambushed me
The first ambush came out of a room where I thought we were building something. The paperwork said we were. Cash was moving. Product was shipping. My name was on the wall.
Then the wall changed. I found out from a lawyer.
I am not going to name names in this piece. Not because I am hiding anything, but because a founder who spends the rest of his life pointing fingers is a founder who never builds again. The point is not who did it. The point is that I signed the paperwork that let it happen.
Every clause that hurt me was in a document I had signed. Every carve-out that mattered was in a section I had skimmed. Every trigger event that got pulled had been sitting there in black and white for years, waiting.
I did not lack a lawyer. I lacked a list of questions.
The second one that ambushed me
You would think the first one would have taught me. It did, in the way pain teaches. What it did not do is give me a checklist.
The second ambush was different in the details. Same in the shape. I signed papers I understood clause by clause but did not understand as a system. I trusted a person who was trustworthy inside the deal and dangerous around the edges of it. I ran a company that could survive the market and could not survive its own governance.
By the time I realized what was happening, the moves that would have saved me were three years in the past. There was no unwind. There was only how much I was willing to lose to walk out clean.
What I started doing after
After the second one, I sat down with a legal pad and started writing every question I wished someone had asked me before I signed anything. Not clauses. Not legal terms. Questions in plain English.
Some were about equity. Most were not.
They were about assumptions. About what happens on a bad day, not a good day. About what your partner does when the numbers are ugly, when their family is stressed, when they get an offer, when you get an offer, when you disagree in a way that will not go away.
The list grew. It kept growing. I hit thirty and thought I had it. Then I remembered a fight from 2016 and added six more. Then I talked to another founder who had been through the same shape of ending and got twelve more.
I stopped at one hundred because a hundred is a number you can finish. It is not a magic number. It is a workable one.
Why a workbook, not a memoir
I did not want to write a book about me. Nobody needs another founder memoir. What I needed, back when the first ambush was still in front of me and I did not know it yet, was a workbook.
Something you could sit down with, alone or across a table, and just answer. Question one. Question two. Question three. If you could not answer, you knew where the gap was. If your partner could not answer, you knew where the gap was.
The book has a hundred questions and almost no prose between them. That was on purpose. The value is not what I say. The value is what you say when you look at the question.
Who told me not to publish it
Two people I respect told me not to publish it.
The first told me it would make me look bitter. That anyone who reads a hundred equity questions from a guy who has been through four partnerships is going to assume he is the bitter one, not the wise one.
The second told me it would tank future deals. That the sharks in the market would see the book and assume I had trust issues. That my next deal would be harder because of it.
I heard both of them. I published anyway.
Here is why. I am not writing this book for future deals. I am writing it for the founder who is right now, today, sitting across from a person who wants their equity. That founder does not care whether I look bitter or wise. That founder wants to know what to ask before the pen hits paper.
If publishing this makes me a harder deal, good. I would rather do business with people who read Founder Fallout and want to talk about the questions than with people who see the book and get quiet.
Who this book is for
It is for founders. It is for co-founders. It is for the operator who is about to be handed a slug of equity and is not sure what strings come with it. It is for the family member who is being told to sign into a family LLC. It is for the friend who is being asked to invest.
It is also, and I will say it and mean it, for a couple sitting at a kitchen table before they get married. That is the biggest partnership most people ever enter. The questions in the book are equity questions, but the shape of them works for anyone about to bet their name on someone else's decisions.
Every partnership has a shelf life. Founder Fallout gives you the questions to ask before the clock starts running on yours.
What I hope you do with it
Buy it. Do not read it. Work it.
Sit down with a pen, at a table, alone or across from the person you are about to sign with. Answer question one. If it opens up a fight, that fight was already there. You just found it before it cost you the company.
Do that with all one hundred.
If, at the end, you still want to sign the paperwork, sign it. You will sign it with your eyes open and with a document you will actually be able to defend in a hard conversation two years from now.
If you do not want to sign it, do not sign it. That is the point.
I wrote Founder Fallout because I have paid the tuition for these questions in cash and in years. You do not have to.
Buy Founder Fallout direct on jeremybarker.com at $24.99, on Amazon in paperback, or on Amazon Kindle.
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