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1. You don't. This is a legitimate fear. You get through it through communication. You say to the other person: "In the past, when I've co-founded projects; I

1. You don't. This is a legitimate fear. You get through it through communication. You say to the other person: "In the past, when I've co-founded projects; I felt I was doing a lot more than my co-founder. For instance, once we had the prototype done we started pitching it to clients, but for every 10 clients I pitched the product my co-founder would pitch to 1. I decided to abort the project as I didn't want to do 80% of the work while earning only 50% of the profits." If the response is something like "Well, I'm really just looking for a fun project to do after work..." keep looking - you have different objectives and motivations. As an aside, the best co-founder relationships are formed on complimentary skill sets. You can do what they can't (or struggle with), and vice versa. As such, I would encourage you to find a sales person/designer/hustler, as opposed to another developer. 2. Very clear upfront communication of exactly your previously stated concerns over coffee or (ideally) drinks, and then vesting. Also, this statement is completely, painfully wrong: "while the other person focuses on the business aspects, which in my opinion are much less demanding on software related projects" I would never co-found a project or company with someone who ever said this to me. You're saying to the other person "No matter how good you are, or what partnerships you make, or how you market this project, or which key customers you close, or what relevant market research you do, or who you hire, or which investors you close, your performance can never measure up to the demanding schedule and work of the developer," which is a pretty bad place to start forming a partnership with another person.

michaelq 12y ago
> As an aside, the best co-founder relationships are formed on complimentary skill sets. You can do what they can't (or struggle with), and vice versa. As such, I would encourage you to find a sales person/designer/hustler, as opposed to another developer. On the face of it, this advice seems reasonable. But this advice will result in precisely the asymmetry to OP is worried about. If you have a technology product, I strongly discourage you from taking on a non-technical cofounder. I made a huge mistake co-founding a company with someone whom I thought had a skill set that would compliment mine. He was, of course, a non-technical. While I coded for 90 hours a week trying to build an MVP, he did thought experiments, worried about competitors, and fretted about the color of our logo. In short, he did very little to move the product forward other than arbitrarily tweaking design specifications (before we had MVP and were even able to A/B test or validate with users). It was an extremely counterproductive and demoralizing experience. This may sound like an edge case, but I meet people all the time whose startups failed because the team couldn't get along. This is usually caused by one person feeling like they're doing all the work. And that's usually because one person IS doing all the work - the other person is a non-technical cofounder, and can't do much meaningful work, only look busy by trying to get twitter followers, having lunch meetings with reporters, and doing competitor analysis - all work that is meaningless if you don't have an MVP you can use to validate and iterate toward product-market fit. My advice is simple: find a technical cofounder who also has the confidence to pitch. Find a technical cofounder who can help validate an MVP and iterate it to product-market fit. Find a technical cofounder who isn't daunted by needing to pick up new skills. This is a startup. You're looking for generalists, not specialists. Whether someone can code is a good litmus test for whether they are serious about doing tech startups, or merely dabbling.
- jason_tko 12y ago
  My advice still holds, and yes, it is also completely reasonable. You found a terrible co-founder. A terrible co-founder, business or otherwise, will generate terrible outcomes. One thing that is very important to understand is that a great business co-founder is as rare (if not rarer) than a great technical co-founder. If you happen to find someone like that, having an attitude that they won't do any work, and they won't "do much meaningful work", will not endear them to you. If they're a great business co-founder, they will have nearly unlimited options, much like great technical co-founders. They might also have great market knowledge, plenty of inside connections, and experience on what to do, and how to do it. And as you brought it up, experience on how to get to product market fit. All of which is invaluable. Further, and please don't take this the wrong way, but their experience in connecting with and evaluating people might have prevented you from choosing the clearly incompetent person that you ended up selecting.
  - michaelq 12y ago
    Rather than dismissing my cofounder as terrible, I encourage you to consider the possibility that advice like yours, which we followed in cofounding the company, set him up for failure. Having specialization early on was a mistake. It was a difficult situation, and it wasn't entirely his fault that there was, for long stretches of time, little for him to do. A startup cycle goes something like this: initial theory -> MVP -> validation of theory using MVP -> iterating to product-market fit -> scale Even in that highly oversimplified flow, there are a lot of shifts from "product mode" to "development mode". Most of these steps must happen sequentially. If only half of the team is fully engaged in any given step, you get a lot of slack. There's a joke that first startups should hire a bunch of developers to build the product. Then they should fire the developers and hire a bunch of salespeople to sell the product. Which begs the question - why not just hire developers who can sell, and avoid paying all that unemployment? Larger organizations can get away with having specialists onboard. Smaller organizations (2-3 people) can't afford this luxury. Your advice would hold for a later stage startup, but it is unreasonable advice for an early stage startup.
    - 12y ago
Envec83 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback Jason. It's good to know this is a legitimate fear, and I'll certainly work on the clear upfront communications to mitigate the problem.
- jason_tko 12y ago
  Sure - best of luck. Finding a great co-founder is really, really hard. In fact, chances are you will spend more time with your co-founder than your significant other. I'd advise spending as much time as possible, and trying to work together on some smaller projects before making the plunge. Oh, as a minor note, instead of saying "I decided to abort the project as I didn't want to do 80% of the work while earning only 50% of the profits." I would smooth that out to something like, "After some discussions on the amount of time we were both able to commit, in the end it made sense to stop working together. It seemed like the best choice since I was able and willing to spend a lot more time than he/she was, so we ended up parting ways amicably." Assuming of course, that is what happened..!

michaelq 12y ago

> As an aside, the best co-founder relationships are formed on complimentary skill sets. You can do what they can't (or struggle with), and vice versa. As such, I would encourage you to find a sales person/designer/hustler, as opposed to another developer. On the face of it, this advice seems reasonable. But this advice will result in precisely the asymmetry to OP is worried about. If you have a technology product, I strongly discourage you from taking on a non-technical cofounder. I made a huge mistake co-founding a company with someone whom I thought had a skill set that would compliment mine. He was, of course, a non-technical. While I coded for 90 hours a week trying to build an MVP, he did thought experiments, worried about competitors, and fretted about the color of our logo. In short, he did very little to move the product forward other than arbitrarily tweaking design specifications (before we had MVP and were even able to A/B test or validate with users). It was an extremely counterproductive and demoralizing experience. This may sound like an edge case, but I meet people all the time whose startups failed because the team couldn't get along. This is usually caused by one person feeling like they're doing all the work. And that's usually because one person IS doing all the work - the other person is a non-technical cofounder, and can't do much meaningful work, only look busy by trying to get twitter followers, having lunch meetings with reporters, and doing competitor analysis - all work that is meaningless if you don't have an MVP you can use to validate and iterate toward product-market fit. My advice is simple: find a technical cofounder who also has the confidence to pitch. Find a technical cofounder who can help validate an MVP and iterate it to product-market fit. Find a technical cofounder who isn't daunted by needing to pick up new skills. This is a startup. You're looking for generalists, not specialists. Whether someone can code is a good litmus test for whether they are serious about doing tech startups, or merely dabbling.

jason_tko 12y ago
My advice still holds, and yes, it is also completely reasonable. You found a terrible co-founder. A terrible co-founder, business or otherwise, will generate terrible outcomes. One thing that is very important to understand is that a great business co-founder is as rare (if not rarer) than a great technical co-founder. If you happen to find someone like that, having an attitude that they won't do any work, and they won't "do much meaningful work", will not endear them to you. If they're a great business co-founder, they will have nearly unlimited options, much like great technical co-founders. They might also have great market knowledge, plenty of inside connections, and experience on what to do, and how to do it. And as you brought it up, experience on how to get to product market fit. All of which is invaluable. Further, and please don't take this the wrong way, but their experience in connecting with and evaluating people might have prevented you from choosing the clearly incompetent person that you ended up selecting.
- michaelq 12y ago
  Rather than dismissing my cofounder as terrible, I encourage you to consider the possibility that advice like yours, which we followed in cofounding the company, set him up for failure. Having specialization early on was a mistake. It was a difficult situation, and it wasn't entirely his fault that there was, for long stretches of time, little for him to do. A startup cycle goes something like this: initial theory -> MVP -> validation of theory using MVP -> iterating to product-market fit -> scale Even in that highly oversimplified flow, there are a lot of shifts from "product mode" to "development mode". Most of these steps must happen sequentially. If only half of the team is fully engaged in any given step, you get a lot of slack. There's a joke that first startups should hire a bunch of developers to build the product. Then they should fire the developers and hire a bunch of salespeople to sell the product. Which begs the question - why not just hire developers who can sell, and avoid paying all that unemployment? Larger organizations can get away with having specialists onboard. Smaller organizations (2-3 people) can't afford this luxury. Your advice would hold for a later stage startup, but it is unreasonable advice for an early stage startup.
  - 12y ago

Envec83 12y ago

Thanks for the feedback Jason. It's good to know this is a legitimate fear, and I'll certainly work on the clear upfront communications to mitigate the problem.

jason_tko 12y ago
Sure - best of luck. Finding a great co-founder is really, really hard. In fact, chances are you will spend more time with your co-founder than your significant other. I'd advise spending as much time as possible, and trying to work together on some smaller projects before making the plunge. Oh, as a minor note, instead of saying "I decided to abort the project as I didn't want to do 80% of the work while earning only 50% of the profits." I would smooth that out to something like, "After some discussions on the amount of time we were both able to commit, in the end it made sense to stop working together. It seemed like the best choice since I was able and willing to spend a lot more time than he/she was, so we ended up parting ways amicably." Assuming of course, that is what happened..!