I started a trading business that is doing really well. We started with $40k of our own funds and turned it into $95M, doing around $6B (2-4%) per day of trading volume of crypto markets globally. (beating market returns by more than 100x). We do not have users, clients, investors or advisors.
We are quite new to managing a business, and we have some difficulties about negotiating the compensation of everyone. We would like to know what is fair in our situation, for that we need an unbiased external opinion.
The question we have right now is for one of the co-founders who is leaving (on good terms). He had a critical role in getting the business off the ground. Quick history of our collaboration: I spent around 1 year hacking on a prototype, by that point I had something promising (went from 3 to 6k in 2 months with good sharpe ratio). He took over the trading engine and data engineering, and made it much better, allowing us to scale to where we are today. He also made improvements on the machine learning side. We have been working together for 1 year and 2 months. We are a team of 5 people (3 joined since then). He wants to leave in about 6 months from now.
As I said before, we have around 95M of assets. How would you structure such an exit for him? Today, we can actively trade only ~20% of capital, so we have "extra capital" sitting around. Because of that we want to structure the exit in such a way that he takes out a lot of capital right away. The question is how much, and what fraction of equity, if any, should he continue holding after that? Ballpark numbers would help us a lot with the negotiation.
What do you think is a fair exit package for him? Additionally, where do you think I can find a good advisor for such topics ?
I've used Wilson Sonsini (wsgr.com). I can't say if they're better or worse than others.
There are bound to be other suitable firms in NYC, and major entrepreneurial cities worldwide.
Of course, this wouldn't be a cheap solution, but perhaps that's ok given the importance of getting this kind of thing right?
Good luck!