A dedication to the book that changed how we think about equity
SLICING PIE
Your share of the pie should always equal your share of the risk. No politics. No guessing. Math decides.
Based on the book by Mike Moyer
The problem
73%
of founding teams split equity in the first month
Before anyone has built anything. Before anyone knows who will show up at 2 AM when the server is on fire. Before the first dollar of revenue or the first year of grind. They guess. They negotiate. They get it wrong.
A fixed split at the beginning is a guess about the future. And it is almost always wrong. One co-founder contributes 80% of the work while the other owns 50% of the equity. Resentment builds. Teams fracture. The mission dies.
The Model
THE PIE ADJUSTS
Mike Moyer solved this. The Slicing Pie model tracks every at-risk contribution — time, money, ideas, relationships, equipment, facilities — and converts them into normalized units called slices. Your equity percentage is always exactly proportional to what you have put at risk.
Your Slices ÷ All Slices = Your Equity %
Dynamic. Self-adjusting. Fair at every moment in time — not just the day the handshake happened.
The Multipliers
NOT ALL RISK IS EQUAL
Cash is harder to come by than time. Moyer accounts for this with multipliers — weights that normalize different types of contributions into a single comparable unit.
4x
Cash Multiplier
Money invested, unreimbursed expenses, out-of-pocket costs. Cash is scarce and carries the highest risk weight.
2x
Non-Cash Multiplier
Unpaid time, ideas, intellectual property, relationships, equipment, and facilities. Real risk, real value, different weight.
What Counts
EVERY CONTRIBUTION MATTERS
Anything you provide without full payment at fair market value is an at-risk contribution. The model captures all of it.
TIME
Hours worked at your fair market hourly rate, unpaid. The most common contribution in a bootstrapped organism.
MONEY
Cash invested, unreimbursed expenses, anything that came out of your pocket and did not come back.
IDEAS
Intellectual property, designs, code, strategic frameworks. Valued by what it would cost to hire someone to create them.
RELATIONSHIPS
Introductions, partnerships, connections that open doors. Valued by customer acquisition cost or business development rates.
EQUIPMENT
Physical assets contributed: laptops, tools, cameras, vehicles. Valued at fair market price or replacement cost.
FACILITIES
Office space, studio time, warehouse access, venue use. Valued at comparable market rental rates.
The Grunt Fund Calculator
WATCH THE PIE MOVE
Add contributions. Watch the equity shift in real time. No spreadsheet. No argument. Just math and a pie that tells the truth.
ADD A CONTRIBUTION
Add contributions to
see the pie form
see the pie form
The Freezing Point
THE PIE LOCKS
The dynamic split does not run forever. When the organism breaks even or raises enough capital to pay contributors fair market value for their work, the pie freezes. That is your equity. Final. Fair. Earned.
Contribute
Accumulate Slices
Freeze
If someone leaves before the freeze, the model calculates a fair buyout based on their accumulated slices. No drama. No lawsuits. Just the math.
Why This Matters
THE BEAUTIFUL BUFFET
The Local Motives is an organism — not a company. Every participant contributes something different. Artists contribute talent. Cities contribute infrastructure. Brands contribute capital. Builders contribute code and sweat. The Slicing Pie model ensures that every contribution is measured, multiplied, and reflected in ownership.
Nobody gets a free ride. Nobody gets shorted. The person who shows up at 2 AM to fix the deployment gets the same fair treatment as the person who writes the first check. The pie does not care about titles. It cares about risk.
Justice — the fourth cardinal virtue of the Builder's Code — demands that we render to every person their due. Slicing Pie is how we do that with mathematical precision instead of handshake promises.
SLICING PIE
"A person's share of the equity should always be equal to that person's share of the at-risk contributions."
This page is a dedication. Mike Moyer wrote the book that solved one of the oldest, ugliest problems in startup culture — how to split equity fairly when nobody has any money and everyone has something to prove. He did not just theorize. He built a model so clean, so logically airtight, that it makes every other approach look like guessing. Because that is what they are.
The Local Motives adopted this model because it aligns with what we already believe: nobody gets a free ride and nobody gets shorted. Everyone eats proportionally to what they bring to the table. That is the Beautiful Buffet applied to ownership itself.
Mike, if you ever read this — the seat is yours. The organism runs on your math.
GET THE BOOK →
This page is a dedication. Mike Moyer wrote the book that solved one of the oldest, ugliest problems in startup culture — how to split equity fairly when nobody has any money and everyone has something to prove. He did not just theorize. He built a model so clean, so logically airtight, that it makes every other approach look like guessing. Because that is what they are.
The Local Motives adopted this model because it aligns with what we already believe: nobody gets a free ride and nobody gets shorted. Everyone eats proportionally to what they bring to the table. That is the Beautiful Buffet applied to ownership itself.
Mike, if you ever read this — the seat is yours. The organism runs on your math.
The pie is forming.
Every contribution counts.
Pull up a chair.
THE MEGAPHONE →