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Ask HN: Co-founder performance issues. How to not loose everything?
Hi HN,
I need some much needed guidance in dealing with cofounder relationship problem.
Context: Both me and my co-founder (CEO)(equal owners of the company) come from very good educational and professional backgrounds and have worked in the valley before we started the company together. I manage the tech side. The team was a marriage of complimentary skillsets but we had not worked together or knew each other much before we started the company. Given our backgrounds, we were able to raise a decent angel round, enough to quit jobs and work on our idea.
Problem at hand: In the last couple of months, the team has been extremely demotivated and our earliest couple of employees left us citing issues with management. Almost all the issues are related to my cofounder's attitude. If I had to summarize them
1. Extremely authoritative and a lack of inclination to learn/understand - This is very demotivating for the tech team
2. Non performance, Lying and erosion of credibility - We hardly get any customer interactions and employees often wonder what my cofounder is doing and some have directly asked me. However, whenever questioned either we get false confirmation of work that never happens or get asked to just wait and be patient as things take time.
3. Stingy - My cofounder is penny wise pound foolish. This has led to massive compromises in the hiring as well as internal team frustration due to unnecessary cost optimization
Independent of all this, I very much believe in what we are building and hence want to take this to a good logical end at least. We also have some very good investors who have been extremely supportive (to the extent that they hardly question us of our progress, and it kinda becomes tough for me to reach out to them with these problems). I thus want to do justice to them and the employees who have worked with me while also, getting basic reward for all the efforts and sacrifices I and my cofounder have put in the last 18 months.
- CuteBrowser 8y agoI have no experience but start documenting everything to begin with. Then talk to the investors. And then to him too- hard for him to try and refute everything.
- toBeDeleted 8y agoFair enough. But since, there has been no priced round, dont think investors have any voting rights in the company either. Can they still effect any change in the company then?
- CuteBrowser 8y agoGo and talk anyway but without voting rights they can't affect change. They can however tell you the best course of action to save their investment if you can assure that it will happen. Show them that their effort will not go waste and they can try.
- wmf 8y agoTrigger the shotgun clause.