11 ms·

The Co-Founder Relationship

156 points by kawera 9y ago

winslett 9y ago
Nails it... > The co-founder dysfunction impacts everyone in and around the company, but mostly the team underneath the founders. It is like being in a family where mom and dad aren’t getting along. There is stress and strain, messed up decision making, and everyone is walking on eggshells. I’ve been apart of an org suffering from founder relationship dysfunction. It was detrimental to achieving potential and took a toll on everyone emotionally. Frankly, it sucked... There are disagreements which will happen...which is child’s play compared to this experience. There were attempts to undermine the performance of the team to derail the success of particular founders. One founder would shut down like a child when another founder had control. There is “ not getting along” which is okay, and there is “locked in a death cycle of subversion.” Another startup I’ve been part of had the quote: “do you know what kind of ship doesn’t float? A partner-ship.” He’s a reasonably successful loner-as-a-founder because he’s been burned so badly in the relationships.
- winslett 9y ago
  ‪If you know me and you know the experience, I don’t think any one person was to blame in that scenario. It took behaviors from a participants involved to make it as painful as it was. The example I gave of subversion wasn’t just one bad actor—it was all involved.
dahart 9y ago
> Founder conflict is pervasive in startup land but is not discussed very often. All the options discussed in the article are last resort. I'd love to see some more coaching about what the causes are, how to identify it early, and how to handle it before it's a real problem. My experience as a co-founder is that very minor differences in personal agendas between two people can turn into large problems later, even when the two co-founders are respectful, honest, diplomatic, and willing to compromise. I'm sure it's a lot like bands, how the majority of them break up over "artistic differences". Everyone has their own reasons for doing what they're doing, and they line up exactly with other people's reasons almost never. I'd love to hear about how to identify misalignments early, because I've tried and I find it very difficult. Everyone's excited early on and trying to avoid conflict, myself included. I'd love to hear about what to do about it when misalignment is discovered, it's not obvious that there's a solution -- I can't change the reasons I joined a band or launched into a startup, I can't expect someone else to modify their hopes and dreams just because mine aren't the same.
- grx 9y ago
  Maybe it's an idea to collect some break points/strategy turns that can be observed in other companies with similar structure and product as your (future) company. And then discussing the causes, possible actions and evaluating the results - if available. It should show pretty fast where differences lie.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Spot on. In my last startup failure I think there were two major lessons: - You can never really be sure of your co-founders personal goals or priorities until there is a crisis situation that forces them to be surfaced. - In crisis situations, nothing else matters more than power structures, both formal and informal. (Conversely, outside of crises, power structures generally lurk beneath the surface while ths sun is shinning.) Tactical lessons would be to ensure any venture you are a part of you are hedged from finding yourself behind a single-point-of-failure in the power structure, be it a co-founder, an investor, a partner, or a client. Always have an escape hatch or at lease an assurance than in any particular crisis you will have options to influence the outcome, and not be gated by a singular entity's decisions or influence.
  - jeffmould 9y ago
    You can never really be sure of your co-founders personal goals or priorities until there is a crisis situation that forces them to be surfaced. 100% accurate and I would say is probably the root of most founder breakups. It is easy to say you are "in it together" and your interests are aligned when everything is going well. But the minute something happens that has even the slightest potential to impact someone's personal goals or priorities, the spirit of being in it together can easily fly out the window. I believe that human nature makes this piece inevitable to some extent. People can naturally grow defensive when their goals or priorities are threatened. I think the bigger problem comes when that person hides that from the other founder(s). They continue to put up a front by saying that everything is ok, but their actions tell a different story.
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    +100 I have had two business partnerships with a co-founder go south after a few years when personal situations changed drastically. With my first co-founder, it was when his wife was relegated to a wheelchair when an operation went wrong, and with the second, it was when her partner decided to end their long term relationship. NB: I wouldn't say that I was squeaky clean innocent either - in the first case above, I had also just gotten married about the same time, so it was the sudden change in goals and priorities for each of us that was the catalyst for the co-founder relationship to break down.
neom 9y ago
Speaking from experience. Talking to the board when you're not a founder or on the board can be a very very delicate things and is likely to get you fired if you approach it incorrectly. I'd recommend taking one board member out for a coffee and really posing it as asking for advice, not asking the board to get involved. I would also advise against doing this behind the CEOs back. That being said, getting board advice can really help you see how to support the founders more meaningfully.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  This comment bothers me, but I can't quite put my finger on why. It's not you – your intentions are quite good. It's valuable information. I think it's bothersome because it's true. And that reveals just how subservient employees actually are. If you're an employee, you're servile. It permeates everything you do, and the way you're forced to interact and think with everyone around you. But especially those above and below you. In fact, "above" and "below" you are artificial terms. We're all people. Yet some people are more special than others. It's very hard to want to participate in such a system. But this is a personal flaw of mine.
  - pacala 9y ago
    It's a search space. Think of people "above" as being more likely to know which direction to search next, and people "below" as being less likely to have a clue. Ignore people "above" at your own peril, fail to mentor people "below" at their peril.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      If only. I love a good search space. (Really, there are few things more delightful.) The people above you are usually as clueless as you are. They just conceal it with confidence. Which they acquire because you can't fire the people above you, and it's less likely for their decisions to destroy the company/team than for your decisions to get you pruned. Being forced to bow your head and meekly speak in just the right way is enough to make me want to vomit. And I don't know where this feeling is coming from. It's very strong, and it came on in the last 6 months or so. It doesn't seem healthy. It probably sounds like I look down on people who act that way. Quite the opposite. It's more like realizing we're all forced to act that way, all the time, and suddenly I'm not so sure this system is one we should want to submit to. Even if people try to convince you that the power dynamic isn't there, it is. Every single decision you make is through the lens of "will this get me fired?" Especially when it matters, as this article illustrates. Which is by definition the most important time to take action.
alain94040 9y ago
If you want to have fun for a second, I collected some co-founder issues from famous startups, based on court documents filings. You can read it here: http://thestartupconference.com/2016/05/13/famous-co-founder-issues/ http://thestartupconference.com/2016/05/13/famous-co-founder... Don't make those mistakes -- easier said than done. At least in the case of early stage startups, I'm not convinced that the board can help. And early is when co-founder issues pop up.
hitekker 9y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong: wasn't it YC that said that most startups die because of internal as opposed to external problems, and of those problems, founder conflict ranks near the top? This article has some good ideas, but I'd be more wary of coaches; they can be enablers instead of arbitrators. Even more so than marriage counselors, I see incentive for them to act on behalf of one side instead of the company as-a-whole. That's what I observed in one of my previous gigs, where the coach served as half-inquisitor, half-message-therapist: interrogating senior staff with subtle questions like "who are the enemies of the founders?", "Who is against the company?, while reassuring the CEO of his own enlightenment. To be fair, this life coach wouldn't have been paid if they told the CEO the truth. After all, who wants to be told what they already know?
jorgec 9y ago
"2/ The team underneath the founders should feel like they have the right, and the responsibility, to talk to the Board and investor group when founder dysfunction gets really bad." Unless you are a key employee, you mustn't do that. For a founder, the business is everything, for an employee, it's another job. An employee has the privilege to quit at whim, the founder can't do that. Anyways, most employees don't see the whole picture of the business so, how can they evaluate a founder?
fictionfuture 9y ago
This is why there is usually one clear leader on most "successful" founding teams. Cofounder situations are a significant risk which can and does outweigh the benefits in many startups
madaxe_again 9y ago
Oh boy. I could write about this ad infinitum, so I’ll keep it as brief as I can. I left my business a bit over a year ago, and while I can cite dozens of immediate issues as the reason (literally dying from stress and anxiety - hospitalisations, inadequate compensation, dissatisfaction with direction), the fundamental problem was the relationship between me and my cofounder. We were always a slightly odd pairing. We'd known each other since childhood, drifted apart, and drifted back together 12 years ago through a shared passion for making neat and innovative stuff - namely e-commerce sites. He was design, I was code. Simple stuff when it was two of us. We grew, our roles shifted. He ended up orchestrator, managing day-to-day production, and generally ensuring that the team pulled together efficiently. I ended up sales, hires, customer relationships, strategy, and driving the technology - we built a nifty platform that allowed more efficient production. It worked well enough - he was good at tactical thinking, me strategic. Where it fell apart - friendship, and our differing approaches to it. I covered his ass day in, day out, to clients, staff, and the investor who came in in our sixth year. I protected him from himself - and took the fall for pretty much everything that ever went wrong, as my attitude is that if nobody will take responsibility, I will, as only then can we actually do anything about it. I even did this when he actively undermined initiatives agreed upon in board meetings, damned fool that I am. In return, he gaslit me and threw me under the bus, daily - and I never did anything to let him know this wasn't OK, as I still saw the fragile boy who'd had a tumultuous childhood and had crazy social anxiety. On the odd occasion when I did say "you broke it, you buy it", or "you need to tell the investor why this isn't happening", he'd stonewall me and the rest of the company for days on end. I never did figure out how to broach the topic. Retrospectively, I got this really wrong - I should've let him suffer for his errors, so that he might learn from them. Instead I shielded him from reality, and took it on my shoulders. I slowly but surely became a maniac - walking off the reservation when it got too much, stoning myself to sleep every night, and finding myself going into a full blown panic at the smallest things. I used to be, and am once more, pretty much implacable. The final straw for me was when I had to go and renegotiate all of our client contracts, cap in hand, as we were overservicing for our fee schedule - mostly because the technical initiatives that would've helped efficiency got strangled in the crib in production in favour of short-term "wins" (not wins at all), as nobody, not me, not the architects and dev leads who I'd hired and nurtured could push back against him. I couldn't in good conscience send the new client services director off to do this, as it would irrevocably taint guide relationship with clients, and I already knew the writing was on the wall for me, so him surviving me was essential if I was to leave the business without it being a total train wreck - so off I went. There was a lot of crying and shouting on clients' parts, and I had no option but to play officer hardass. Had I some, any, support from him I would have weathered it - but instead he gave me a hard time for upsetting the clients, and not a shred of thanks when I'd come back from days on the road, getting clients to agree to a 100%+ hike. Ultimately, the investor lost confidence in me, the clients all hated me, as I was seen as the source of all problems, real and imagined, my mental and physical health took a massive slide, and I was asked to leave. I did so, gladly, and negotiated an exit which wasn't terrible. The last year has been illuminating, insofar as 2/3 of the team has turned over (30/45), they've gained only one client (I'd usually make 6+ £2M+ total value sales a year), and lost a few. I can't even feel schadenfreude over this, as it's my damn fault for not stepping up and dealing with the elephant in the room - his and my relationship - and everybody suffered because of it. My next business, I'm doing alone. Also, it's been great training for marriage, which I did shortly after leaving - I fucked up royally with wife #1 (co-founder - not actually married, but it's a very similar type of relationship), and am endeavouring to do it right with real wife #1, by allowing her to make her own mistakes and learn from them, rather than shielding and protecting, which is my first instinct.
ilamont 9y ago
Don't work with a co-founder. Ycombinator, Fred Wilson, and others in the investor community will frown, but if you can swing it as a solo founder (and many people do) you are avoiding the Russian roulette that comes with pairing up with someone else.
- mooreds 9y ago
  There are very real costs to not having a cofounder though. Founding is hard, I have no idea how solo founders handle the work and the emotional swings.
  - ilamont 9y ago
    Agreed, but I found the emotional swings to be much harder with a cofounder than as a solo founder. As for the work aspect - either way is hard, the challenge as a solo founder is making the right partnerships and outsourcing where your skills are weak.
    - wolco 9y ago
      Why not have three or ten co founders? All could bring value in different ways:
      - mooreds 9y ago
        Haha, I assume this was reductio ad absurdum. It's hard enough to make decisions and to align 2-4 co-founders, I can't imagine trying to make any kind of strategic (read, hard) decision with 10.
        wolco 9y ago
        You would do what larger groups do and vote. Like a defacto board.
        mooreds 9y ago
lkrubner 9y ago
When I am not a founder at a startup, the only times I am invited to talk to the Board is when something has gone wrong. Then the founders are trying to shift the blame on to me, rather than take the blame for their own decisions. And even though I want to talk to the Board, I avoid these meetings, because I don't want my first meeting with the Board to be dominated by the question "Why is your software behind schedule?" This has been discussed on Hacker News before, but again, here are a few brief excerpts about how this relationship fell apart at a startup where I was at in 2015: July of 2015 ...All the same, a wave euphoria swept over John, which he communicated to the Board Of Directors. Much later, I learned that at this time they began to schedule their plans around the assumption that we'd be making significant money by September. Again, though I can admire a sales team that aims to hit aggressive targets, making such plans around a product that doesn’t yet exist, and which seems to be running behind schedule, is delusional. August of 2015 ...But Twilio would be a very dangerous step for us. If John and the Celolot Board of Directors really wanted us to ditch our iPhone app, this meant that we would be 100% committing ourselves to English as our only interface — and building a flawless NLP engine would be indispensable. There would be no buttons, no forms, nothing to click on. Just words and phrases written in English, submitted by innumerable users. And if we failed to build an NLP engine that could understand all of it, then we were doomed. I thought NLP was a fantastic supplement to traditional interfaces, but as a complete replacement, it was a huge gamble. It was like jumping out of an airplane without a spare parachute. Furthermore, if we had Hwan build us an app, then we could customize it in some really cool ways. Special messages, special ways of allowing data to be edited – things that are not possible with the standard iPhone Message app. September of 2015 ..."I am asking a hypothetical question." I thought this was obvious, but I was willing to emphasize the fictional nature of the scenario if it would calm him down. "But why would you ask that?" The intensity of his reaction was as if I’d just asked him something obscene. "Because I think hypothetical questions are important." "I don't! I think working is important! Let's work hard and get this software running!" "I’m sure we’ll get it working at some point, but we have already seen many unexpected delays." I pointed this out as calmly as I possibly could. "What if we encounter another?" "If we miss this deadline, I'm going to ask you to talk to Milburn [of the Board]." He threatened this as if it were the worst punishment he could imagine inflicting on me. Like, if the prisoner does not break during waterboarding, then we have them talk to Milburn. "You don’t want to talk to him?" I treaded carefully. "You talk to him every day." "No, you can talk to him about this." I was wary. It sounded a lot like I was being set up to take the fall for John's bad decisions. A part of me very much wanted to talk to the board, just to be sure they understood the real situation. I wanted to warn them about Sital. I wanted to impress upon them the absolute urgency of the Conversation FSM. But I didn't want my first real conversation with Milburn to be dominated by the question, "Why are you running late?" ========================== excerpted from here: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
hoodoof 9y ago
I have wondered why Paul Graham is so adamant that having cofounders are better than single founder, when cofounders seem to be a key reason for startup failure. I would have thought that the preferred option would be single founders.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Single founders introduce a few other common failure modes that are alleviated by having cofounders: giving up, mental health, stamina, running out of money, and missing the market opportunity. It's like you can trade one big point of failure - cofounder dysfunction & breakups - for death by thousand paper cuts. (Note also that institutional stakeholders would usually rather have a SPOF that they can identify and intervene in, rather than a bunch of little failure points that might sneak up on you and are very difficult to stave off. This may or may not be in the interests of the individual founder, who often has an information advantage and better mitigation strategies for identifying and counteracting these other failure points.)
  - toomim 9y ago
    This is a good point. Single founders fail when the single founder has problems. Relationships fail when both individuals have problems. The value of a co-founder is that they can cover for some of your problems. But likewise, a co-founder can also introduce problems, and if their problems interact with your problems, then the relationship turns sour and you suffer a divorce, which can be its own problem, and tear the company apart.
- ihaveajob 9y ago
  Interestingly in the latest StartX session there are more single-founder companies than not. Not sure if it the first time this happens, but it definitely didn't used to be like that.
- segmondy 9y ago
  if you want to fast, go alone. if you want to go far, go with others.
- 9y ago
thesausageking 9y ago
The startup cult is wrong about this. It's much better if founders can "keep it in the family" and always work out any issues among themselves, with a trusted person not connected to the company, if needed. Once investors and board get involved, they may use the instability against you. Fred (avc), has done this a number of times in the past. One well-documented example is detailed in Hatching Twitter. While Ev was CEO of Twitter, Fred and the board told Ev he was doing a great job. At the same time, they were secretly meeting with Jack to engineer the plan they would later carry out to push Ev out of Twitter and bring in an outside CEO.

156 points by kawera 9y ago

Nails it... > The co-founder dysfunction impacts everyone in and around the company, but mostly the team underneath the founders. It is like being in a family where mom and dad aren’t getting along. There is stress and strain, messed up decision making, and everyone is walking on eggshells. I’ve been apart of an org suffering from founder relationship dysfunction. It was detrimental to achieving potential and took a toll on everyone emotionally. Frankly, it sucked... There are disagreements which will happen...which is child’s play compared to this experience. There were attempts to undermine the performance of the team to derail the success of particular founders. One founder would shut down like a child when another founder had control. There is “ not getting along” which is okay, and there is “locked in a death cycle of subversion.” Another startup I’ve been part of had the quote: “do you know what kind of ship doesn’t float? A partner-ship.” He’s a reasonably successful loner-as-a-founder because he’s been burned so badly in the relationships.

winslett 9y ago
‪If you know me and you know the experience, I don’t think any one person was to blame in that scenario. It took behaviors from a participants involved to make it as painful as it was. The example I gave of subversion wasn’t just one bad actor—it was all involved.

dahart 9y ago

> Founder conflict is pervasive in startup land but is not discussed very often. All the options discussed in the article are last resort. I'd love to see some more coaching about what the causes are, how to identify it early, and how to handle it before it's a real problem. My experience as a co-founder is that very minor differences in personal agendas between two people can turn into large problems later, even when the two co-founders are respectful, honest, diplomatic, and willing to compromise. I'm sure it's a lot like bands, how the majority of them break up over "artistic differences". Everyone has their own reasons for doing what they're doing, and they line up exactly with other people's reasons almost never. I'd love to hear about how to identify misalignments early, because I've tried and I find it very difficult. Everyone's excited early on and trying to avoid conflict, myself included. I'd love to hear about what to do about it when misalignment is discovered, it's not obvious that there's a solution -- I can't change the reasons I joined a band or launched into a startup, I can't expect someone else to modify their hopes and dreams just because mine aren't the same.

grx 9y ago
Maybe it's an idea to collect some break points/strategy turns that can be observed in other companies with similar structure and product as your (future) company. And then discussing the causes, possible actions and evaluating the results - if available. It should show pretty fast where differences lie.
gfodor 9y ago
Spot on. In my last startup failure I think there were two major lessons: - You can never really be sure of your co-founders personal goals or priorities until there is a crisis situation that forces them to be surfaced. - In crisis situations, nothing else matters more than power structures, both formal and informal. (Conversely, outside of crises, power structures generally lurk beneath the surface while ths sun is shinning.) Tactical lessons would be to ensure any venture you are a part of you are hedged from finding yourself behind a single-point-of-failure in the power structure, be it a co-founder, an investor, a partner, or a client. Always have an escape hatch or at lease an assurance than in any particular crisis you will have options to influence the outcome, and not be gated by a singular entity's decisions or influence.
- jeffmould 9y ago
  You can never really be sure of your co-founders personal goals or priorities until there is a crisis situation that forces them to be surfaced. 100% accurate and I would say is probably the root of most founder breakups. It is easy to say you are "in it together" and your interests are aligned when everything is going well. But the minute something happens that has even the slightest potential to impact someone's personal goals or priorities, the spirit of being in it together can easily fly out the window. I believe that human nature makes this piece inevitable to some extent. People can naturally grow defensive when their goals or priorities are threatened. I think the bigger problem comes when that person hides that from the other founder(s). They continue to put up a front by saying that everything is ok, but their actions tell a different story.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  +100 I have had two business partnerships with a co-founder go south after a few years when personal situations changed drastically. With my first co-founder, it was when his wife was relegated to a wheelchair when an operation went wrong, and with the second, it was when her partner decided to end their long term relationship. NB: I wouldn't say that I was squeaky clean innocent either - in the first case above, I had also just gotten married about the same time, so it was the sudden change in goals and priorities for each of us that was the catalyst for the co-founder relationship to break down.

neom 9y ago

Speaking from experience. Talking to the board when you're not a founder or on the board can be a very very delicate things and is likely to get you fired if you approach it incorrectly. I'd recommend taking one board member out for a coffee and really posing it as asking for advice, not asking the board to get involved. I would also advise against doing this behind the CEOs back. That being said, getting board advice can really help you see how to support the founders more meaningfully.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
This comment bothers me, but I can't quite put my finger on why. It's not you – your intentions are quite good. It's valuable information. I think it's bothersome because it's true. And that reveals just how subservient employees actually are. If you're an employee, you're servile. It permeates everything you do, and the way you're forced to interact and think with everyone around you. But especially those above and below you. In fact, "above" and "below" you are artificial terms. We're all people. Yet some people are more special than others. It's very hard to want to participate in such a system. But this is a personal flaw of mine.
- pacala 9y ago
  It's a search space. Think of people "above" as being more likely to know which direction to search next, and people "below" as being less likely to have a clue. Ignore people "above" at your own peril, fail to mentor people "below" at their peril.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    If only. I love a good search space. (Really, there are few things more delightful.) The people above you are usually as clueless as you are. They just conceal it with confidence. Which they acquire because you can't fire the people above you, and it's less likely for their decisions to destroy the company/team than for your decisions to get you pruned. Being forced to bow your head and meekly speak in just the right way is enough to make me want to vomit. And I don't know where this feeling is coming from. It's very strong, and it came on in the last 6 months or so. It doesn't seem healthy. It probably sounds like I look down on people who act that way. Quite the opposite. It's more like realizing we're all forced to act that way, all the time, and suddenly I'm not so sure this system is one we should want to submit to. Even if people try to convince you that the power dynamic isn't there, it is. Every single decision you make is through the lens of "will this get me fired?" Especially when it matters, as this article illustrates. Which is by definition the most important time to take action.

alain94040 9y ago

If you want to have fun for a second, I collected some co-founder issues from famous startups, based on court documents filings. You can read it here: http://thestartupconference.com/2016/05/13/famous-co-founder-issues/ http://thestartupconference.com/2016/05/13/famous-co-founder... Don't make those mistakes -- easier said than done. At least in the case of early stage startups, I'm not convinced that the board can help. And early is when co-founder issues pop up.

hitekker 9y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong: wasn't it YC that said that most startups die because of internal as opposed to external problems, and of those problems, founder conflict ranks near the top? This article has some good ideas, but I'd be more wary of coaches; they can be enablers instead of arbitrators. Even more so than marriage counselors, I see incentive for them to act on behalf of one side instead of the company as-a-whole. That's what I observed in one of my previous gigs, where the coach served as half-inquisitor, half-message-therapist: interrogating senior staff with subtle questions like "who are the enemies of the founders?", "Who is against the company?, while reassuring the CEO of his own enlightenment. To be fair, this life coach wouldn't have been paid if they told the CEO the truth. After all, who wants to be told what they already know?

jorgec 9y ago

"2/ The team underneath the founders should feel like they have the right, and the responsibility, to talk to the Board and investor group when founder dysfunction gets really bad." Unless you are a key employee, you mustn't do that. For a founder, the business is everything, for an employee, it's another job. An employee has the privilege to quit at whim, the founder can't do that. Anyways, most employees don't see the whole picture of the business so, how can they evaluate a founder?

fictionfuture 9y ago

This is why there is usually one clear leader on most "successful" founding teams. Cofounder situations are a significant risk which can and does outweigh the benefits in many startups

madaxe_again 9y ago

Oh boy. I could write about this ad infinitum, so I’ll keep it as brief as I can. I left my business a bit over a year ago, and while I can cite dozens of immediate issues as the reason (literally dying from stress and anxiety - hospitalisations, inadequate compensation, dissatisfaction with direction), the fundamental problem was the relationship between me and my cofounder. We were always a slightly odd pairing. We'd known each other since childhood, drifted apart, and drifted back together 12 years ago through a shared passion for making neat and innovative stuff - namely e-commerce sites. He was design, I was code. Simple stuff when it was two of us. We grew, our roles shifted. He ended up orchestrator, managing day-to-day production, and generally ensuring that the team pulled together efficiently. I ended up sales, hires, customer relationships, strategy, and driving the technology - we built a nifty platform that allowed more efficient production. It worked well enough - he was good at tactical thinking, me strategic. Where it fell apart - friendship, and our differing approaches to it. I covered his ass day in, day out, to clients, staff, and the investor who came in in our sixth year. I protected him from himself - and took the fall for pretty much everything that ever went wrong, as my attitude is that if nobody will take responsibility, I will, as only then can we actually do anything about it. I even did this when he actively undermined initiatives agreed upon in board meetings, damned fool that I am. In return, he gaslit me and threw me under the bus, daily - and I never did anything to let him know this wasn't OK, as I still saw the fragile boy who'd had a tumultuous childhood and had crazy social anxiety. On the odd occasion when I did say "you broke it, you buy it", or "you need to tell the investor why this isn't happening", he'd stonewall me and the rest of the company for days on end. I never did figure out how to broach the topic. Retrospectively, I got this really wrong - I should've let him suffer for his errors, so that he might learn from them. Instead I shielded him from reality, and took it on my shoulders. I slowly but surely became a maniac - walking off the reservation when it got too much, stoning myself to sleep every night, and finding myself going into a full blown panic at the smallest things. I used to be, and am once more, pretty much implacable. The final straw for me was when I had to go and renegotiate all of our client contracts, cap in hand, as we were overservicing for our fee schedule - mostly because the technical initiatives that would've helped efficiency got strangled in the crib in production in favour of short-term "wins" (not wins at all), as nobody, not me, not the architects and dev leads who I'd hired and nurtured could push back against him. I couldn't in good conscience send the new client services director off to do this, as it would irrevocably taint guide relationship with clients, and I already knew the writing was on the wall for me, so him surviving me was essential if I was to leave the business without it being a total train wreck - so off I went. There was a lot of crying and shouting on clients' parts, and I had no option but to play officer hardass. Had I some, any, support from him I would have weathered it - but instead he gave me a hard time for upsetting the clients, and not a shred of thanks when I'd come back from days on the road, getting clients to agree to a 100%+ hike. Ultimately, the investor lost confidence in me, the clients all hated me, as I was seen as the source of all problems, real and imagined, my mental and physical health took a massive slide, and I was asked to leave. I did so, gladly, and negotiated an exit which wasn't terrible. The last year has been illuminating, insofar as 2/3 of the team has turned over (30/45), they've gained only one client (I'd usually make 6+ £2M+ total value sales a year), and lost a few. I can't even feel schadenfreude over this, as it's my damn fault for not stepping up and dealing with the elephant in the room - his and my relationship - and everybody suffered because of it. My next business, I'm doing alone. Also, it's been great training for marriage, which I did shortly after leaving - I fucked up royally with wife #1 (co-founder - not actually married, but it's a very similar type of relationship), and am endeavouring to do it right with real wife #1, by allowing her to make her own mistakes and learn from them, rather than shielding and protecting, which is my first instinct.

ilamont 9y ago

Don't work with a co-founder. Ycombinator, Fred Wilson, and others in the investor community will frown, but if you can swing it as a solo founder (and many people do) you are avoiding the Russian roulette that comes with pairing up with someone else.

mooreds 9y ago
There are very real costs to not having a cofounder though. Founding is hard, I have no idea how solo founders handle the work and the emotional swings.
- ilamont 9y ago
  Agreed, but I found the emotional swings to be much harder with a cofounder than as a solo founder. As for the work aspect - either way is hard, the challenge as a solo founder is making the right partnerships and outsourcing where your skills are weak.
  - wolco 9y ago
    Why not have three or ten co founders? All could bring value in different ways:
    - mooreds 9y ago
      Haha, I assume this was reductio ad absurdum. It's hard enough to make decisions and to align 2-4 co-founders, I can't imagine trying to make any kind of strategic (read, hard) decision with 10.
      - wolco 9y ago
        You would do what larger groups do and vote. Like a defacto board.
        mooreds 9y ago

lkrubner 9y ago

When I am not a founder at a startup, the only times I am invited to talk to the Board is when something has gone wrong. Then the founders are trying to shift the blame on to me, rather than take the blame for their own decisions. And even though I want to talk to the Board, I avoid these meetings, because I don't want my first meeting with the Board to be dominated by the question "Why is your software behind schedule?" This has been discussed on Hacker News before, but again, here are a few brief excerpts about how this relationship fell apart at a startup where I was at in 2015: July of 2015 ...All the same, a wave euphoria swept over John, which he communicated to the Board Of Directors. Much later, I learned that at this time they began to schedule their plans around the assumption that we'd be making significant money by September. Again, though I can admire a sales team that aims to hit aggressive targets, making such plans around a product that doesn’t yet exist, and which seems to be running behind schedule, is delusional. August of 2015 ...But Twilio would be a very dangerous step for us. If John and the Celolot Board of Directors really wanted us to ditch our iPhone app, this meant that we would be 100% committing ourselves to English as our only interface — and building a flawless NLP engine would be indispensable. There would be no buttons, no forms, nothing to click on. Just words and phrases written in English, submitted by innumerable users. And if we failed to build an NLP engine that could understand all of it, then we were doomed. I thought NLP was a fantastic supplement to traditional interfaces, but as a complete replacement, it was a huge gamble. It was like jumping out of an airplane without a spare parachute. Furthermore, if we had Hwan build us an app, then we could customize it in some really cool ways. Special messages, special ways of allowing data to be edited – things that are not possible with the standard iPhone Message app. September of 2015 ..."I am asking a hypothetical question." I thought this was obvious, but I was willing to emphasize the fictional nature of the scenario if it would calm him down. "But why would you ask that?" The intensity of his reaction was as if I’d just asked him something obscene. "Because I think hypothetical questions are important." "I don't! I think working is important! Let's work hard and get this software running!" "I’m sure we’ll get it working at some point, but we have already seen many unexpected delays." I pointed this out as calmly as I possibly could. "What if we encounter another?" "If we miss this deadline, I'm going to ask you to talk to Milburn [of the Board]." He threatened this as if it were the worst punishment he could imagine inflicting on me. Like, if the prisoner does not break during waterboarding, then we have them talk to Milburn. "You don’t want to talk to him?" I treaded carefully. "You talk to him every day." "No, you can talk to him about this." I was wary. It sounded a lot like I was being set up to take the fall for John's bad decisions. A part of me very much wanted to talk to the board, just to be sure they understood the real situation. I wanted to warn them about Sital. I wanted to impress upon them the absolute urgency of the Conversation FSM. But I didn't want my first real conversation with Milburn to be dominated by the question, "Why are you running late?" ========================== excerpted from here: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

hoodoof 9y ago

I have wondered why Paul Graham is so adamant that having cofounders are better than single founder, when cofounders seem to be a key reason for startup failure. I would have thought that the preferred option would be single founders.

nostrademons 9y ago
Single founders introduce a few other common failure modes that are alleviated by having cofounders: giving up, mental health, stamina, running out of money, and missing the market opportunity. It's like you can trade one big point of failure - cofounder dysfunction & breakups - for death by thousand paper cuts. (Note also that institutional stakeholders would usually rather have a SPOF that they can identify and intervene in, rather than a bunch of little failure points that might sneak up on you and are very difficult to stave off. This may or may not be in the interests of the individual founder, who often has an information advantage and better mitigation strategies for identifying and counteracting these other failure points.)
- toomim 9y ago
  This is a good point. Single founders fail when the single founder has problems. Relationships fail when both individuals have problems. The value of a co-founder is that they can cover for some of your problems. But likewise, a co-founder can also introduce problems, and if their problems interact with your problems, then the relationship turns sour and you suffer a divorce, which can be its own problem, and tear the company apart.
ihaveajob 9y ago
Interestingly in the latest StartX session there are more single-founder companies than not. Not sure if it the first time this happens, but it definitely didn't used to be like that.
segmondy 9y ago
if you want to fast, go alone. if you want to go far, go with others.
9y ago

thesausageking 9y ago

The startup cult is wrong about this. It's much better if founders can "keep it in the family" and always work out any issues among themselves, with a trusted person not connected to the company, if needed. Once investors and board get involved, they may use the instability against you. Fred (avc), has done this a number of times in the past. One well-documented example is detailed in Hatching Twitter. While Ev was CEO of Twitter, Fred and the board told Ev he was doing a great job. At the same time, they were secretly meeting with Jack to engineer the plan they would later carry out to push Ev out of Twitter and bring in an outside CEO.