The Co Founder Contract That Couldn’t Save Us

When Your Technical Co-Founder Walks Away:

Business Development Series — Part Two

The Person You Trust With Everything

There is a specific kind of vulnerability that comes with being a non-technical founder. You are not just hiring someone. You are handing them the keys to the entire machine. Every plan you have, every investor conversation, every promise you make to your audience, every piece of momentum you’ve built  … all of it becomes contingent on one person doing what they said they would do.

I want to talk about what happens when they don’t.

In part one of this series, I shared the background on Government Auctions UK, the loss of our original tech partner Dave, and the years of difficult experiences with developers that followed. This article picks up where that one left off, because the most recent chapter is the one that hurt the most and taught me the most.

How CodingNZ Came Into the Picture

I met Josh Trebilco (since deleted his Linkedin account) through the Ministry of Awesome startup cohort in New Zealand. For anyone unfamiliar, Ministry of Awesome is a respected startup programme and community, and being part of their cohort carries a certain implied credibility. You assume the people in the room are serious. You assume a shared standard of professionalism and commitment.

Trebilco was the founder of CodingNZ, a New Zealand based web development operation. On paper and in person, this looked like exactly what I needed. Someone with technical credentials, their own running business, and therefore some financial independence that meant they weren’t coming to GAUK out of desperation. He understood the opportunity, was enthusiastic about the project, and assured me he had the bandwidth and the residual income from CodingNZ to commit properly.

I want to be clear about something. I asked the right questions. I raised my concerns directly and early. I was not naive about what I was entering into. The assurances I received were specific and confident.

What Was Agreed

The decision was made, largely at Trebilco’s recommendation, to scrap our existing build — which was at 90% completion with a working MVP — and rewrite the platform from scratch. I had reservations about this. Significant ones. But his technical reasoning was presented with conviction and I agreed.

The timeline was six months. We had a contract. We had agreed scope. We had a shared understanding of what the deliverable looked like and when it would arrive.

I held up my end. The marketing engine kept running. We generated millions of views across social media. I ran a countdown to launch email sequence — something I deeply regret — based on Trebilco’s own projected timeline. The audience was warm, growing, and ready. The platform just never materialised.

Seven months in, with the product still unfinished, Trebilco announced he had taken a full-time position with a logistics company called Road Ninja. He proposed contributing one day a week going forward.

That did not happen in any meaningful way.

Shortly after, he messaged to say he was stepping away from GAUK entirely.

The Truth About What Contracts Can and Cannot Do

Here is what I have come to understand, and what I wish someone had told me plainly before I signed anything.

A contract is not protection. It is documentation.

It documents what was agreed. It records intentions. But when a co-founder or technical partner walks away from a startup, a contract does not bring them back. It does not rebuild the months of lost runway. It does not refund the audience trust you spent on promises you made in good faith based on their timeline.

And in practical terms, for most founders at our stage — bootstrapped, pre-revenue on the new build, still proving the model — suing someone for breach of contract is simply not a realistic option. The legal costs alone would exceed whatever damages you could reasonably claim, and that assumes you win. Meanwhile, the person who walked away has a salary coming in every fortnight from their new employer. They are fine. You are the one holding the wreckage.

Trebilco broke the agreed scope. He missed every significant deadline. He walked away from a commitment that had real consequences for a real business. But what am I supposed to do about it? The honest answer, and it is a bitter one, is: not much. Not without resources I do not have, because the situation he left me in is precisely what drained those resources.

That asymmetry is infuriating. And it is real. And it needs to be part of every honest conversation about co-founder agreements.

A Warning to Founders in the MoA Community

I have been told that Trebilco is still active and engaged within the Ministry of Awesome network, connecting with other founders who are potentially looking for technical co-founders or development partners.

I want to say something carefully and factually here. I am not making accusations beyond what I have directly experienced. What I can say is this: if you are a founder in that community, or any startup community, and you are considering a technical partnership, ask hard questions about every previous commitment the person has made. Ask what happened to those commitments. Ask what accountability looks like when timelines slip or scope changes or life intervenes.

The startup community in New Zealand is small. Reputation travels. And the founders who get hurt most are the ones who trusted a room and an introduction over a deeper investigation.

What This Actually Costs

People talk about co-founder risk in terms of equity splits and legal exposure. What they talk about less is the real cost: the audience you built, the investors you got close to, the email subscribers who watched a countdown clock tick to zero, the months of your life and your savings that went into supporting a partnership that evaporated.

GAUK had momentum. Real momentum. Social reach, engaged users, a clear market, years of SEO authority. What it did not have was a platform to send any of that traffic to, because the person responsible for building it decided, on his own timeline and for his own reasons, that he had somewhere better to be.

He is at Road Ninja now. Stable salary, new challenge, moving on.

I am rebuilding. Again.

What Non-Technical Founders Actually Need to Know

The contract conversation matters, but it is not where the real protection lives. The real protection is in the structure you build before anyone signs anything, in the milestone gates you insist on, in the working software you demand at each stage rather than promises of working software at the end.

It is in never letting go of the existing build until the new one is proven. It is in keeping your audience promises tied to what exists, not what is coming. It is in understanding that the leverage in a technical co-founder relationship almost always sits with the person who controls the code, and designing your agreement with that reality in mind from day one.

We will go deeper on all of that in the next article. Because the lessons I have paid for deserve to be worth something to someone.

Next in the series: What co-founder agreements actually need to include — the clauses most founders never think to ask for.