“It’s a good idea to keep enough control so that investors can’t fire you (there are a lot of different ways to do this), but beyond that, it’s important to bring in other people and trust them to help you build the company.”
It's easy to get the share structure you want if you're the founder of a typical C Corp. Sam Altman can probably do it in his sleep.
In a non-profit structure, your options are much more limited. There are no shares, no shareholders, no IPOs, no investors, no valuations that you can appeal to as an indicator of your performance. Conflicts within the board often boil down to a battle of reputation and influence, ego and resentment.
But in addition to the problem of predicting the future that applies to any businesses assessment of what will best serve its future goals, the goals of a charitable nonprofit are often not things that are easily to measure achievement of or progress toward objectively, which makes some debates even fuzzier than they are in business organizations.
There will be two classes of shares, one where each gets 50 votes, and one where each gets one. I get the first one and we'll issue the second to everyone else.
