lins1909

Hi HN,

For the past year, I've been working as the sole developer of a product together with a cofounder who has a sales/marketing background.

We haven't signed an official contract, but we do have an agreement in writing (texts) about what the equity split is.

I've done a lot of work on this and we're now ready to go live with the product.

However, I'd like to take a step back from the product over the next year as I'm going back to study and I want to focus on other interests. I'm open to still being involved, just not as an active developer.

What are my options here for ensuring that if this startup is successful and gets sold, I still get a significant piece of the pie? Our equity split is 50-50.

I am planning to get a graduate degree (MSc/MPhil at first) in 2-3 years, as I want to get involved in Computer Science research.

But before then, I would like to know how I can get involved with research while working in the industry, apart from reading papers. Partly to boost my application chances, and also because I'm interested in research.

I have a wide range of interests at the moment: distributed systems, computer architecture, programming languages, etc, and I've been telling myself that I'll use the next few years to learn about these things and then specialize.

Does anyone here have any ideas, or have you done something similar? What would you advice?