Ask HN: How to deal with potentially many founders?

Hey,

I'm about to start a new entrepreneurial journey in Biotech. In the past I made the experience that small complementary founder-teams of 2, maximum 3 people works best.

The current set up already has 4 founders and we could very quickly gain interest of many people from Bioinformatics down to sales that want to be part of it. Which is a really good sign. But as everyone somehow wants to be engaged on a founder-level, I'm wondering what the best setup would be here.

I want to keep the cap-table small and I also want to reserve a virtual stock options pool for hires we need at a later growth stage. So it somehow feels like a dilemma.

How could a company structure look like in this case?