Co-founders definitely do horrible things just to retain equity for themselves.
Another true story: A team co-founded a company together. They all agreed to be co-founders and split the equity as fairly as possible.
Co-founder X was put in charge of legal, since noone else wanted to do it. Unbeknownst to the others, X allocated a small pool of shares for everyone except for X, taking the vast majority of the company for himself.
When everyone received their share agreement, they did the division against the "total shares" listed in the agreement. Everyone's percentages came out as expected, since they falsely believed the "total shares" represented the total shares in the company -- rather than in the pool.
To illustrate this, X owned over 83% of the company, while the next highest co-founder Y (the CTO) vested < 0.33%/year. Amazingly, X and Y had both agreed to take identical pay (below living) and make identical sacrifices, i.e. quitting their jobs to go full-time together.
Y left after a year, having found out months prior and given X time to resolve it in (misplaced) good faith. X managed to get VC investment only a few months later -- by not mentioning that the company's CTO had quit only a few months earlier.
When the VCs found out about Y, X then informed Y he was never the CTO but a "freelancer" -- even though Y had joined with the intention of being CTO, performed all CTO duties, and was called the CTO by everyone involved. The other co-founders were informed to write they were retroactively "Founding Members" rather than "co-founders."
Of course, if the co-founders are experienced about business it would be difficult to pull this off. For example, you should insist on seeing the cap table even if you believe you know the percentages.
However, this happened to intelligent co-founders right out of college, who even had a parent's lawyer friend look over the contracts.
Another true story: A team co-founded a company together. They all agreed to be co-founders and split the equity as fairly as possible.
Co-founder X was put in charge of legal, since noone else wanted to do it. Unbeknownst to the others, X allocated a small pool of shares for everyone except for X, taking the vast majority of the company for himself.
When everyone received their share agreement, they did the division against the "total shares" listed in the agreement. Everyone's percentages came out as expected, since they falsely believed the "total shares" represented the total shares in the company -- rather than in the pool.
To illustrate this, X owned over 83% of the company, while the next highest co-founder Y (the CTO) vested < 0.33%/year. Amazingly, X and Y had both agreed to take identical pay (below living) and make identical sacrifices, i.e. quitting their jobs to go full-time together.
Y left after a year, having found out months prior and given X time to resolve it in (misplaced) good faith. X managed to get VC investment only a few months later -- by not mentioning that the company's CTO had quit only a few months earlier.
When the VCs found out about Y, X then informed Y he was never the CTO but a "freelancer" -- even though Y had joined with the intention of being CTO, performed all CTO duties, and was called the CTO by everyone involved. The other co-founders were informed to write they were retroactively "Founding Members" rather than "co-founders."
Of course, if the co-founders are experienced about business it would be difficult to pull this off. For example, you should insist on seeing the cap table even if you believe you know the percentages.
However, this happened to intelligent co-founders right out of college, who even had a parent's lawyer friend look over the contracts.