Dear HN,<p>A friend of mine came to me with a business idea and wanted me to join him as a technical co-founder. I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to that but offered to help him build a prototype so he could raise some money and start a company. I told him I might potentially consider joining the company later, but gave no binding promise.<p>He didn’t have any money at the time to pay me for working on the prototype so we came up with a deal where I would charge my normal hourly consulting rate, but if he hadn’t managed to incorporate and raise money after 3 months, then he wouldn’t have to pay me anything. But all the IP would revert to me and I would essentially own everything.<p>At the time I considered the deal to be fair and pretty low risk for both of us. He claimed to already have investors interested in his idea and I didn’t have any other consulting gig at the moment anyway. I also wanted to help him out starting his company. If he managed to raise some money, which seemed likely, it would be a fairly good payout for me at the end of the 3 months.<p>I worked hard and built the prototype for him. I probably worked harder than needed, but I wanted him to succeed. At the end of the 3 months he claimed that he was on the verge of signing an investment with several angels. But he needed me as a co-founder to close the deal. I told him I would consider it if we split ownership 50/50. Seemed fair, since I basically had built the product all on my own and he had contributed almost nothing, beside the original idea. But he refused to give me anything above 20%, which was a big red flag for me. So the deal with the investor never happened and ownership of all the IP defaulted to me… or so I thought.<p>I obviously dropped the project and went on working on other things. But the other day I read a news article about how my “friend” had just raised a large sum of money from several prominent investors and had been running his company for more than a year with IP that I was the legal owner of. I was shocked by the audacity and emailed the guy telling him that he could please pay me what he owed me, and I would not pursue any legal action. But haven’t gotten any response. <i>crickets</i><p>So what should I do? The amount he owes me is quite a considerable sum for me, but not unreasonable. I have a contract that we both signed listing everything in detail. So shouldn’t be any problem to prove. I never gave him the code I wrote for the product, but a lot of the work was on architecture and product design that I did share with him, so I don’t think it should matter. He is still using my IP.<p>Contacting a lawyer seems like an obvious next step. But that costs a lot of money. I am considering emailing his investors as a next step. But don’t want to screw things up for him. Just want to get payed. He will need to raise a seed round at some point, which would be impossible unless he lies to his investors.<p>Any suggestions on what I should do?