Feb 2013: Chris is a senior in college, and has a great idea for a product, and spends senior year (spring term) working many hours refining the idea into a mockup. Senioritis, you know? Many discussions with other students improves and refines the idea.
May 2013: Chris’ friend Dana is interested in helping on the product. It turns out that Dana has experience from courses and also hacking on the side, and knows just how to build a working prototype.
It becomes a practically full time obsession for the two of them, and together Chris and Dana continue to refine the project and get feedback. During the summer and fall, Dana writes a lot of software, which is a central part of the project.
Jan 2014: Dana and Chris realize that they have a knowledge gap. Chris is the product visionary with strong technical chops. Dana is the hands-on coder and has developed a majority of the code.
However to be able to pay the bills they decide that they need to raise money and to have more business expertise. They have no clue how to do this, but a friend of a friend introduces them to Alex. They really hit it off with Alex, who is very experienced, has been involved in a startup before and knows several angels very well.
Questions to discuss. There are no correct answers. Imagine yourself in the actual situation and ask yourself what your position would be and how you would defend it: