During software engineer Ryan McGeary’s nine years working at seven startups, he has weathered contentious dramas, legal battles, and broken friendships stemming from arguments about how equity should be shared among founders and early investors. At his latest venture, BusyConf, a two-year-old Web service for conference planners, based in Leesburg, Va., his experience was frustratingly familiar—“things got unnecessarily ugly”—and resulted in him buying out his partner earlier this year. “There’s got to be a better way” to handle equity stakes, McGeary says.