How would you guys split equity between two cofounders: one technical and one non-technical? I know this depends on the business, but what skills (besides coding) can the non-technical person contribute at the very early stages of an internet startup?
One thing to take into consideration -- and I've seen this become an issue on several occasions -- is that there is a lot more work required of the technical co-founder. There's a point at which all of non-technical 'work-long-hours-to-produce-a-deliverable-under-deadline' work is done and then the effort switches over to making the occasional document/presentation revision and taking meetings, etc. This tends to happen way before the product is shipped. It's at that point that the techie catches the non-techie browsing boing boing or watching youtube videos and s/he starts to feel resentment.<p>That's when the stock split can sometimes start to seem inequitable in the eyes of the techie unless the split is heavily slanted in favor of the techie, simply because it's natural to think of 'value add' in terms of 'time invested' and not some other difficult-to-measure metric.<p>I know that doesn't answer your question, but no matter what you choose, it's a good idea for both people to discuss and understand the value of their contributions in terms other than the number of hours spent in front of the computer.
You leave so much out - how much work/output will each member do? Are both part or full time or is one full and one part time? Are both taking full salaries, partial salaries, or what?
Basically it also depends upon relationship - going forward non of you have to feel like not compensated appropriately.
Job description for non-hacker could be anything and everything but coding (and/or web designing). So the list can go on and on ...
Sales,
Marketing,
Advertising,
HR,
Finance, etc.
Most of the time will go in to preparing business plan, research about your product/service & competition, sales & marketing and contacting angels/VCs.