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A Cofounder Would Have Sunk My Business
- onion2k 11y agoMy personality is such that if I am working on something with someone else, and they aren’t putting as much effort in as me, I scale back my effort to match theirs. Is the opposite true? If they're putting in more effort do you scale your input up? What happens if you're already at capacity? I take it you'd say to your cofounder "Hang on, this isn't fair on you. You need to put in a bit less effort trying to make this business a success." Or perhaps you wouldn't considering that would be utterly stupid. Most importantly, an entrepreneur needs a vision that they can ferociously believe in. If your vision is half yours, half someone else’s it is pretty tough to put in 12 hours a day for years on end. The point of having a cofounder is that your vision and their vision are the same, but with two people driving the business forward you can get there twice as quickly (or at all if the vision is bigger than something one person can do on their own). To me it sounds like a cofounder would have sunk your business, but only because you've not met anyone who you consider to be an equal who you could work with to build something great. That's a shame.
- pedalpete 11y agoI would add that the vision doesn't necessarily need to be the same, but a great co-founder can help improve your vision. I had a boss (and mentor really) who trusted me with the vision of the product I was working on, and in our early meetings, we would 'leap-frog' each other challenging the other to see a larger and larger vision.