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Is there a meaningful difference between friends who decide to do a startup together versus folks who decide to do a startup together and then become friends? T

by robg 16y ago

Is there a meaningful difference between friends who decide to do a startup together versus folks who decide to do a startup together and then become friends? The highest profile successes seem to be more an instance of the latter, but then success seems to help smooth any differences of opinion.

pg 16y ago
Yes, because in most startups there's a point where things seem hopeless. At that point the startup itself has no power to hold you together, because its expected value is (or appears to be) zero. You need a strong friendship to keep you together. E.g. I know for sure there were lots of times when Rtm thought Viaweb was never going to amount to anything, and only worked on it because I asked him to.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  There would seem to be a huge hack around that - I work with a guy who gets _really_ obsessive about stuff, so much so that he forgets to eat, etc. Maybe you should focus on getting more people who are turned on by an idea, rather than because their friends might get burned.
- robg 16y ago
  Were Woz and Jobs "friends"? Don't Page and Brin claim explicitly they weren't? It seems more like the shared purpose brought those pairs closer together than where they started or where they would have ended up had they never worked together. That example of Viaweb helps clarify the distinction I'm thinking of. You guys were friends and so worked together despite differing convictions. But what of people who share a common purpose and in so doing become friends? Is there room in your model for that instance of the concept?
  - portman 16y ago
    I don't know about Woz/Jobs, but Page/Brin were definitely friends when they started a company. They may not have been friends when they started collaborating on their first research project, but at the moment they were "co-founders", they had already become friends.
    - robg 16y ago
      A lot had also changed by that point - namely they failed in selling the technology to Excite. Would they have stayed friends had they gotten the $1 million they wanted? Shared trials make and break friendships.
    - dirtyaura 16y ago
      Jobs and Woz, as surprising as it might sound given the difference in personalities, were friends, based on what I've read, which is Woz's interview in Founders at Work and Sculley's Odyssey: Pepsi To Apple.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Were Woz and Jobs "friends"? I believe the answer to that is "absolutely". They certainly weren't in it for the money at first. Woz had to be very explicitly convinced to leave his nice job at H-P even after they had built the first Apple PC. If you insist that their friendship was somehow bogus because real friendships do not involve "shared purpose", I'm not sure I have any friends, by your weird definition. My high school friends had the shared purpose of playing games and entering math contests. My college friends had the shared purpose of graduating.
    - robg 16y ago
      I'm pushing back on how friendships likely develop during a startup effort and how that's different from existing friendships that lead to a startup. Jobs and Woz, based on FaW, seem to fall more into the former category. Brin and Page too. By contrast, Gates and Allen, as childhood friends, seem to better fit pg's model. I'm not sure where you got that last bit from what I said. I'm working with some great folks now and we simply started by trying to build something. We're still in that mindset. We didn't start out as friends but after eight months, we are. There's the pressure to get stuff done because we don't want to let each other down. We laugh more than we disagree. It feels like the friendships and the startup are growing together. I have a hard time thinking that the team could be flawed because we didn't start out knowing each other well.
      - edanm 16y ago
        pg isn't saying that your team is flawed - he's talking in general, and in a statistical sense. People who start out as friends before are more likely to succeed - that doesn't imply anything bad about your specific group. I think at the level where you're "interviewing" thousands of teams, looking for patterns starts to mean a lot.
- ditojim 16y ago
  what about brothers?

by robg 16y ago

pg 16y ago

Yes, because in most startups there's a point where things seem hopeless. At that point the startup itself has no power to hold you together, because its expected value is (or appears to be) zero. You need a strong friendship to keep you together. E.g. I know for sure there were lots of times when Rtm thought Viaweb was never going to amount to anything, and only worked on it because I asked him to.

tomjen3 16y ago
There would seem to be a huge hack around that - I work with a guy who gets _really_ obsessive about stuff, so much so that he forgets to eat, etc. Maybe you should focus on getting more people who are turned on by an idea, rather than because their friends might get burned.
robg 16y ago
Were Woz and Jobs "friends"? Don't Page and Brin claim explicitly they weren't? It seems more like the shared purpose brought those pairs closer together than where they started or where they would have ended up had they never worked together. That example of Viaweb helps clarify the distinction I'm thinking of. You guys were friends and so worked together despite differing convictions. But what of people who share a common purpose and in so doing become friends? Is there room in your model for that instance of the concept?
- portman 16y ago
  I don't know about Woz/Jobs, but Page/Brin were definitely friends when they started a company. They may not have been friends when they started collaborating on their first research project, but at the moment they were "co-founders", they had already become friends.
  - robg 16y ago
    A lot had also changed by that point - namely they failed in selling the technology to Excite. Would they have stayed friends had they gotten the $1 million they wanted? Shared trials make and break friendships.
  - dirtyaura 16y ago
    Jobs and Woz, as surprising as it might sound given the difference in personalities, were friends, based on what I've read, which is Woz's interview in Founders at Work and Sculley's Odyssey: Pepsi To Apple.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Were Woz and Jobs "friends"? I believe the answer to that is "absolutely". They certainly weren't in it for the money at first. Woz had to be very explicitly convinced to leave his nice job at H-P even after they had built the first Apple PC. If you insist that their friendship was somehow bogus because real friendships do not involve "shared purpose", I'm not sure I have any friends, by your weird definition. My high school friends had the shared purpose of playing games and entering math contests. My college friends had the shared purpose of graduating.
  - robg 16y ago
    I'm pushing back on how friendships likely develop during a startup effort and how that's different from existing friendships that lead to a startup. Jobs and Woz, based on FaW, seem to fall more into the former category. Brin and Page too. By contrast, Gates and Allen, as childhood friends, seem to better fit pg's model. I'm not sure where you got that last bit from what I said. I'm working with some great folks now and we simply started by trying to build something. We're still in that mindset. We didn't start out as friends but after eight months, we are. There's the pressure to get stuff done because we don't want to let each other down. We laugh more than we disagree. It feels like the friendships and the startup are growing together. I have a hard time thinking that the team could be flawed because we didn't start out knowing each other well.
    - edanm 16y ago
      pg isn't saying that your team is flawed - he's talking in general, and in a statistical sense. People who start out as friends before are more likely to succeed - that doesn't imply anything bad about your specific group. I think at the level where you're "interviewing" thousands of teams, looking for patterns starts to mean a lot.
ditojim 16y ago
what about brothers?