[joeclark77]

I've seen others link Joel Spolsky's method before. In short, you divide ownership equally within "tiers". The founders split the company equally between them. For the first group of employees, a new chunk of shares are created and divided equally, even if they don't join exactly at the same time. The next group of employees divides up the same number of shares (but there are probably more employees in that group, so they end up with less individually than the early employees). And so on. This creates a sense of fairness while still rewarding founders and early employees more for the risk they're taking. (link here: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-allocate-ownership-fai...).