v0-pre-alphaSep 13, 2025
Pre-alpha educational framework. Not legal, tax, accounting, investment, employment, or financial advice. Fairly Exact v0 assumes an LLC-based implementation, but governing documents, interest design, tax treatment, filings, and compliance must be determined by qualified professionals before use.
Fairly Exact Framework
Close enough to be trusted. Fair enough to be accepted.
The problem
Most equity systems force you to predict the future at inception. Who will contribute what over the next 5 years? What will each person's role become? When will people leave?
Reality is always different. But traditional vesting and equity agreements make corrections cumbersome, expensive, and contentious.
Fairly Exact shortens the prediction horizon to manageable blocks of work, allowing natural adjustment as your company's story actually unfolds.
How it works
Define short-term blocks
Set milestones you can actually see (4-12 weeks)
Weight by risk and stage
Early work gets higher multiples (5×→4×→3×→2×→1×)
Allocate by actual contribution
Split each block based on who does what
Accept and mint
Acceptance mints the approved allocation and marks the block MINTED
The foundation
- Trust
- Choose trustworthy partners and communicate relentlessly
- Alignment
- Team harmony matters more than mathematical precision
- Roles
- Explicit responsibilities and commitments documented upfront
- Simplicity
- Defaults and templates keep the system usable
The framework
- No valuation required
- The Contribution Block sizing formula does not require a company valuation
- Blocks
- Milestone-driven contributions with triangular number sizes (1/3/6/10/15/21), chosen using a contractor-equivalent scope proxy; minted units = size × stage multiplier
- Dilution
- Dilution = minted ÷ (ledger + minted) — always computed, always quoted with its ledger size
- Categories
- Build, Sell, Manage, Maintain — all Contribution Block roles are recognized
- Cash
- Cash is tracked separately; any downside-sharing terms are an optional negotiating position documented in a separate instrument
- Stages
- Stage multipliers (5×→4×→3×→2×→1×) reflecting decreasing risk over time, with pre-committed transition triggers
- Value
- Outcomes matter more than hours worked
What it protects
- Recognition
- Delivered contributions recorded and honored; reopened only for misconduct
- Delivery
- Units enter the ledger only after the milestone is delivered and accepted
- Exits
- Departed contributors keep accepted units but lose interim voting weight
- Membership
- Contributors complete the admission and professional review required by the governing documents before work enters the member ledger
- Member ledger
- The member ledger is the framework's allocation and governance record, with a hypothetical final allocation published after each accepted block
- Finalization
- Mandatory triggers freeze the member ledger into path-neutral percentages for professional execution
- Governance
- Certified ledger-weighted voting with a configured approval threshold and status-quo outcome when neither side meets it