It sounds as if you're doing all the technical work and you're unsure of what your partner is contributing but feel obliged to bring him along for the ride. So you already have one person who is not working at capacity... why do you need to hire another one? Bringing on a third non-technical employee is just going to result in one more person telling you they can't land customer X until feature Y is ready.
Tons of people are rightly pointing out that this guy should be optimizing for equity rather than trying to strip-mine the business' savings account, so let me add something else that sounds really fishy to me about this setup: anyone with the experience or skill to serve as CEO in this sort of startup should have major concerns about (1) your lack of full-time involvement, and (2) the lack of clarity over what your co-founder is doing. The fact that these are not the most important issues in your discussions with this guy suggests he does not value his potential equity and will make an absolutely horrible CEO due to a gross inability to recognize and hedge against what are fairly obvious business risks.
Finally, if you believe he is potentially worth 180k for the customers he will introduce, he is probably worth a lot more. One way to figure out whether he thinks he can make sales is to offer him a much better package worth 250k, but make all of his earnings contingent on hitting real milestones which generate revenue for your company. This allows you to pay him out of growth instead of savings and steers the conversation away from an abstract discussion of "executive" salary levels and towards the more practical matter of (1) whether he can drive revenues, and (2) what he feels the product needs to have before he is comfortable leveraging his connections in service of the business.
Tons of people are rightly pointing out that this guy should be optimizing for equity rather than trying to strip-mine the business' savings account, so let me add something else that sounds really fishy to me about this setup: anyone with the experience or skill to serve as CEO in this sort of startup should have major concerns about (1) your lack of full-time involvement, and (2) the lack of clarity over what your co-founder is doing. The fact that these are not the most important issues in your discussions with this guy suggests he does not value his potential equity and will make an absolutely horrible CEO due to a gross inability to recognize and hedge against what are fairly obvious business risks.
Finally, if you believe he is potentially worth 180k for the customers he will introduce, he is probably worth a lot more. One way to figure out whether he thinks he can make sales is to offer him a much better package worth 250k, but make all of his earnings contingent on hitting real milestones which generate revenue for your company. This allows you to pay him out of growth instead of savings and steers the conversation away from an abstract discussion of "executive" salary levels and towards the more practical matter of (1) whether he can drive revenues, and (2) what he feels the product needs to have before he is comfortable leveraging his connections in service of the business.