Should I fire my “cofounder”?

Get rid of him. If he can't show you anything, the accelerator will see right through him.

Yeah fire him. Its obvious he's a poser who values title more than the work. What changes do you expect if you keep him and you get into an accelerator?

Are you sure he's not working? "Not much to show" just might mean it's hard. Some engineering problems simply take a while to figure out.

I'd suggest having a conversation about what's going on, before you axe this person.

It's really hard to judge what a programmer is doing from the outside, there literally is nothing to show sometimes until the work is done- especially if you don't have a good designer doing mock ups.

Plan a few work days where you sit together, get him to focus on the front end so that there is something to see.

If he can't do that, then consider letting him go.

If you're even thinking about it, you should do it.

Keep him on for now until you hear back from the accelerator. In the mean time, start recruiting aggressively for a new tech lead. If you get into the accelerator and you have a new tech founder they'll understand.

There absolutely is a way to see what a developer is up to. If they are doing work, they should be periodically committing code to a shared, cloud-based repository. Two public options are github.com and bitbucket.org.

I have been in your shoes. There is no excuse for a lackadaisical programmer. Time is money. Fire that fool; onward.

I had the same exact experience! My tech co-founder took ages to develop the website we were working on. He didn't "show me" anything for the first 3 months, I was on the edge to take "the decision". Then we got into an accelerator... guess what? I didn't take that decision...

how it ended up? 3 months in the program and the people of the accelerator were super pissed off because we had no product ready (total of 6 months). I had to push insanely to release something and in the end we did. Unfortunately, it was not enough. The accelerator, that could have invested further (much further), didn't take that decision because "they didn't see results quickly enough".

End of the story? We didn't raise other money (Accelerator didn't support afterwards), we shut our company down.

Take decisions based on what you think is good. Better to make a mistake based on your guts, than to make one because you were too worried to fire your co-founder.

OP here. I am the non-tech founder, but I coded the very first version of what we have. I took a chance on this guy because he is a friend and was kind of down on his luck.

We got into an accelerator now and I'm just worried that we're not going to have much of anything. When I ask what the progress is, I essentially see the same stuff from before and he blames things on 'compiling' issues. We are a web-based platform, so I don't see how there can be compiling issues.

I am ready to invest more money into just bringing in an outside contractor for this. To make matters worse as I'm doing the founder's agreement (I have a strong legal background), he now wants to be able to have equity closer to mine. I'm like no dude, only way is if you pay for it through options. It's just very frustrating, but I'll be able to submit as a story. What's your email, Dana? I just might want to have some things redacted.