In this, our third installment of “Free Startup Tools”, we wanted to highlight an agreement launched by Seedcamp, the European

startup accelerator, to help startup founders negotiate the early stages of building a company. (You can check out our first post on The Founder Institute’s effort to standardize the founder-advisor relationship and compensation here and the second post on a tool that helps founders compare their term sheets to the standards here.)

While we’ve touched on these better ways to negotiate term sheets and relationships with advisors, founding a company also often entails bringing on co-founders to help you build your business. Of course, in doing so, it’s important for co-founders to be able to establish a level of trust that allows each founding member to fairly share in the benefits of success.

To do so, Seedcamp (via its Seedhack initiative) is launching the “Seedhack Founder’s Collaboration Agreement”, which according to the initiative’s blog post, has been created to allow newly formed founding teams to “agree on what each founder’s shareholding stake should be” as well as codifying the amount of equity co-founders should receive in accordance with the level of time and effort they pour into the business.

Readers can check out the PDF of the agreement here.

As the accelerator said via its Seedhack blog, the intent with the collaboration agreement is to have it be of use to accelerators and incubators that hose events like Seedcamp’s Seedhack, where “collaboration is key”, as well as to the thousands of startups out there building businesses (and investing sweat equity) in those many ideas, products, and tools before officially creating a “formal” company or enterprise.

Seedcamp says that it wants co-founders to treat the document as fuel for discussion, which can either be used “as-is”, but it should be noted that it is still both a work in progress and a template which founders should modify as they see fit. (Hence the items in brackets, which are left up to founders to input their own language.)

Note: The Seedhack Collaboration Founders Agreement is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Please feel free to share your impressions of the agreement, including whether or not readers believe that the vesting schedule proposed in the document applies generally or is more in line with hackathon-type scenarios.

conference, Page took the stage to address the audience. Watch the entire 45-minute talk above.

Page talked about a range of things — everything from Search to Android to YouTube to Chrome to Google+ to Nikola Tesla (the great inventor who “failed”). But things got more interesting when Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman who, of course, preceded Page as CEO, joined Page on stage for a Q&A. They talk the Motorola deal (while it will nearly double the size of Google’s workforce, Page jokes that he wished it doubled their market cap too), patents (Page notes Google has never sued anyone over patents), innovation (the self-driving cars), and agility (changing the company every year).

At one point, Schmidt takes a shot at Microsoft calling them “one of our former competitors” to laughs. When asked about Yahoo, Schmidt declined to say much but did acknowledge that “they need to sort out their leadership issues”. He also called out ”the mindless and stupid policy” with regard to immigration, calling it a “national crisis”.

When In The Plex author Steven Levy asked what the biggest threat to Google was right now, Page said “Google,” with a big smile on his face. Schmidt tried to be more nuanced: “the problems in a company of Google’s scale are always internal at some level.” “Yeah, that’s why I said ‘Google’,” Page shot back with, to laughs from the audience.

Page also said that the slow down of decision-making as companies grow in size is “tragic”. That’s his aim as CEO, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!