Finding the right co-founder can be one of the most critical and daunting tasks in building a startup. The ideal co-founder should complement your skills, share your vision, and help you navigate the inevitable challenges. Without proper alignment on motivations and values, the relationship can be strained, and the company can suffer - 65% of startups fail due to co-founder conflict (Noam Wasserman, The Founder’s Dilemma).
This post covers why co-founder relationships succeed or fail, the benefits of having a co-founder, and how to build a co-founding team that thrives long-term.
Why Co-Founders Break Up
Understanding why co-founder relationships fail can help you avoid common pitfalls:
- Divergent Visions: When founders develop different goals, it leads to conflict over the company’s direction.
- Founder vs. Non-Founder Mindset: A gap in passion, time commitment, and ownership can cause significant tension. Some may adopt a more passive role, while others expect active involvement, leading to friction.
- Uneven Growth: One founder may outgrow the other in skill or leadership capacity, creating an imbalance.
- Power Struggles: Conflicts over decision-making and control can create friction.
- Dishonesty and Lack of Trust: Breaches of trust or unethical behavior damage the relationship and the business.
Why Not Go It Alone?
Teams with 2-3 co-founders tend to outperform solo founders. Here’s why:
- Higher Success Rates: Startups with two or three founders raise 30% more in investment, grow 3x faster in customer acquisition, and achieve 25% higher valuations at the seed stage.
- Risk Mitigation: Solo founders carry higher key person risk and often struggle with limited time, resources, and skill sets.
- Complementary Skills: A co-founder offsets your weaknesses and provides emotional and strategic support.
- Investor Appeal: Investors see solo founders as riskier and may interpret their inability to recruit others as a red flag.
Should You Have a Co-Founder? The Data Suggests Yes. Antler's Unicorn Founder Roadmap found that unicorns in DACH are overwhelmingly (83%) founded by teams, while only 17% have been started by solo founders. Co-founders provide essential support, and investors tend to view solo founders as riskier because it suggests they haven’t been able to convince others to join them on their journey.
Although, this doesn't mean you can't validate problem areas yourself too. you can always attract a co-founder after the fact.
What Does a Good Co-Founding Team Look Like?
The Fundamentals
Note that there is no reference here to ideas. Choosing a co-founder isn't about the idea - it’s about foundational elements like chemistry, values, and vision. A co-founder team needs to have:
- Chemistry: The ability to work well together over the long haul.
- Values: Shared principles that guide the startup’s direction and guides motivations. Motivations un term shape vision.
- Vision: A shared long-term goal for the future of the company.
- Personality and Skills: Add to the ability to execute but should take a back seat to alignment on values and vision.
“A lot of people treat choosing their co-founder with even less importance than hiring. Don’t do this.” - Sam Altman
An Investor's Perspective
Investors are particularly interested in assessing in a co-founding team:
- Can they service?
- Understands the customer better than anyone else and ensures the product or service delivers as promised.
- Takes responsibility for operating and fulfilling the product and service for the customer.
- Unfair advantage: This could come through knowledge, network, or specific skills that set the team apart from competitors.
- Alignment to the industry/business model: Each team member should demonstrate individual strengths that are aligned with the industry or business model the startup is pursuing.
- Can they sell?
- Finds the right way to package the product and take it to the masses through sales and partnerships.
- Involves all stakeholders who are willing to make actual commitments to the product in order to drive the business forward.
- Can they build?
- Has the ability to build / code, moving fast and effectively.
- Creates something new with existing means, leveraging unexpected situations to overcome or adapt to challenges.
- Complementary and complete skill sets: The team should consist of members with different yet complementary expertise that covers all key areas of the business.
- Team’s ability to execute fast: Speed in execution is key to taking advantage of market opportunities and iterating quickly.
- Ambition to build a big company and alignment on vision: The team must share a long-term vision and possess the ambition to scale the business significantly.
- Chemistry and ability to creatively problem-solve under pressure: Strong interpersonal relationships and the ability to collaborate in high-pressure situations are critical for long-term success.
Strong teams demonstrate complementary skills and the ability to execute fast. Additionally, teams with long-term vision, shared ambition, and strong interpersonal chemistry are more likely to succeed under pressure.
Founder Archetypes
A well-rounded co-founding team ideally consists of three complementary archetypes:
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Commercial Founder
- Brings leadership and experience in bringing products to market.
- Often has experience in scaling companies, management consulting, or investment banking.
- Skilled in problem-solving and breaking down complex issues with a strong commercial toolkit.
- Has past experiences in bringing new products to market.
- Responsible for ensuring successful commercial outcomes for the business.
-
Technical Founder:
- Experienced in leading technical teams, with a hands-on background in product development and scaling.
- Often entrepreneurs themselves, they bring an entrepreneurial mindset and experience in building products, sometimes even launching multiple apps.
- Can include engineers, product leaders, and experts in hardware engineering.
-
Domain Founder:
- Deep expertise and experience in a specific field, whether in research, industry, or a specific type of company.
- May hold IP rights or have a strong research background (e.g., PhDs looking to commercialize their knowledge).
Types of Founder Edge
Understanding your Edge helps identify which problems you are best suited to solve, giving you a competitive advantage. A good team will have a mix of these edges:
-
Technical Edge
- Individuals with deep expertise in a specific technology.
- Typically PhD holders, postdocs, or technologists from commercial research labs.
- Often frustrated by the lack of real-world impact from their academic work.
- Their advantage: deep understanding of a technology that few others possess.
-
Market Edge
- Individuals with extensive experience in a specific industry.
- They possess unique, non-obvious insights that are difficult for outsiders to grasp.
- Frustrated by inefficiencies within their industry, they seek to revolutionize it.
- Their advantage: deep understanding of the market and how it can be improved.
-
Catalyst Founder
- Individuals without a clear Edge of their own but can unlock the potential of their co-founders.
- They accelerate their co-founder’s Edge through strong communication, sales, or full-stack engineering skills.
- Typically restless polymaths, they excel in bringing ideas to life but usually don’t work on their own ideas.
- Traits of a Catalyst Founder:
- Strong communicators
- Skilled in sales
- Full-stack engineers
- High energy
- Product management experience
To read more on founder edge, check this blog post.
How to Find a Co-Founder
What to Look For
Start by aligning on values, vision, and commitment. Chemistry and long-term compatibility are essential:
- Alignment in Vision and Values: Ensure long-term goals and core principles are aligned to prevent future conflicts.
- Chemistry: The relationship should be strong, as you will spend an enormous amount of time working closely together.
- Commitment Level: Both founders must demonstrate the same level of dedication and ownership in the company.
- Handling Power Dynamics: Establish clear roles and responsibilities early to prevent conflicts over decision-making.
Only AFTER all of this, do we look at Complementary Skills. This is where we find someone whose strengths complement your weaknesses, creating a well-rounded team.
- Complementary Strengths: When co-founders have complementary skills (or "spikes"), no weaknesses exist.
- Weakness is Relative: The areas where one person is weak shouldn't matter, as long as someone else in the team excels in those areas.
- Honesty about Weaknesses: Be brutally honest about your own weaknesses and seek out co-founders who complement your skills.
The sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The team is more important than the individual.
Maximizing the Likelihood of Finding the Right Co-Founder
- Start with Chemistry: The foundation of a strong partnership begins with personal compatibility. Socializing and working together on small projects helps assess whether you can collaborate effectively.
- Network Extensively: Tap into your network and remain open to new connections. The right co-founder could emerge from unexpected places.
- Test Compatibility: Before fully committing, work on real-world tasks together. This allows you to observe problem-solving approaches, work ethic, and teamwork under pressure.
- Deep Discussions on Values: Go beyond superficial topics and have honest conversations about values, long-term goals, and potential areas of conflict. Alignment on vision and commitment is essential for long-term success.
- Be Honest About Strengths and Weaknesses: Openly identify your own limitations and seek out co-founders whose skills complement yours.
Don’t Rely on Shortcuts: Success in co-founding requires broad communication, collaboration, and testing the waters. Increase your chances of finding the right co-founder by following these practices:
- Spend More Time Than Feels Necessary: Thoroughly explore founder dynamics by dedicating time to understanding each other before committing.
- Work with Someone While Meeting Others: It's okay to collaborate with one person while still evaluating others, as long as you maintain transparency.
- Engage in Multiple Activities: Aim to work with 20 to 30 people per week across various settings to better understand working styles.
- Explore Founder Fit: Before finalizing your decision, work with all potential co-founders to evaluate alignment in values, vision, and work styles.
- Address Tough Topics First: Discuss crucial areas like decision-making, roles, equity split, and conflict management early to avoid issues later.
Don't Take Shortcuts:
- Avoid focusing only on the question: "What's your idea?" It’s easier to reject an idea than a person. The idea will develop, and the problem area itself, you would not have thought about in the context of the skills the person you are talking to has. So don't eliminate people based solely on apparent ideas.
- Don’t eliminate people based solely on apparent skills.
- Don’t disregard individuals based on their background - make thoughtful decisions.
Also, at the end of the day, Gut Instinct Matters. While frameworks and data are important, we should trust our instincts about potential co-founders. Chemistry and passion can’t always be quantified but are essential for long-term success.
Handling the Search Process
As you embark on this journey, understanding your own strengths and weaknesses is crucial. After aligning on motivations, Identify what you bring to the table and what skills you need in a co-founder. Begin to explore each other's strengths and weaknesses. Co-founders will fill in each other's gaps to create a united front. The ideal co-founder will possess the skills you lack, ensuring a well-rounded team. Ask yourself, and your co-founder:
- What are you good at?
- What do you love doing?
- What are your weaknesses?
- What unique insights do you have
- What is your experience with fundraising, and how do you approach investors?
- Which sector would you say you have the most experience in?
- What will you have the most fun doing for yourself in a few years?
After this, make sure to also discuss practicalities of how you two work together.
- Working hours
- Salaries and Runway
- What type of people to bring to the team
- Discuss roles and equity split
- Focus on clear roles and responsibilities to avoid conflict.
- Prioritize trust and constructive dialogue within the team.
- How do you evaluate the technical feasibility of a solution and forecast risks?
- What is the best way of building, hiring, and managing an engineering team in a high-performing business?
- How do you approach customer feedback and incorporate that into the product roadmap?
- How do you want to approach the product and market?
- How do you reach conviction during the validation process?
Co-CEOs do not work - having clearly defined roles is essential. You have more ego than you think - address this upfront to avoid conflicts later.
We stress the importance of having tough but necessary discussions early on to ensure smooth operation and shared understanding between co-founders, particularly around values, practical considerations, and responsibilities.
Maintaining a Strong and Cohesive Team
Building and maintaining a cohesive team is a continuous process:
- Resilience: Regular check-ins, open feedback, and addressing issues promptly are key to long-term success.
- Flexibility: Adapt to changes as the company evolves.
- Trust and Respect: Strong relationships are built on mutual respect and shared goals.
- Work-Life Balance: Spending time together outside of formal meetings helps build rapport and improves team chemistry.
Frameworks for Assessing Co-Founding Teams
You should continuously assess your co-founder relationship across six key dimensions:
- Alignment: Shared vision and goals.
- Adaptability: Flexibility in changing objectives when needed.
- Efficiency: Maximizing productivity with available resources.
- Energy: Proactivity and sustained productivity.
- Resilience: Ability to withstand pressure and adversity.
- Collaboration: Fostering a cohesive and supportive team environment.
Tools and Practices for Team Success
Building a company is challenging, and maintaining a cohesive team requires constant work.
- Challenges: Building a company is inherently challenging, and founders will experience tension within the team as they progress.
- Skill Development: Founders develop and refine their skills as they build, with individual contributions shifting and evolving at different stages of growth.
- Distributed Teams: Very few founding teams develop their companies entirely in a distributed fashion, which can add complexity to maintaining cohesion.
- Team Efficiency: Continuous work is needed to ensure the founding team - and, eventually, the broader team of employees - functions like a well-oiled machine.
- Simple Rules and Procedures: Establishing simple rules and clear procedures can help keep the team's "spark" alive and maintain strong working relationships.
Key strategies include:
- Resilience: Regular check-ins, honest feedback, and addressing conflicts proactively are critical.
- Flexibility: The ability to adapt to changes quickly.
- Trust and respect: Crucial for effective collaboration.
- Work-life balance: Spending time together outside of meetings to foster team chemistry.
To build and sustain resilience within a co-founding team, focus on the following key areas:
- Health and Effectiveness: Prioritize the health and overall effectiveness of your co-founding team. Regular check-ins and attention to team dynamics are crucial to ensure the team remains cohesive and high-performing.
- Forward-Focused and Aligned: Use tools and frameworks to ensure that the team is always looking ahead and staying aligned on goals, vision, and execution strategies. This helps the team stay focused even when challenges arise.
- Flexible Planning: Develop a flexible plan for yourself and your team. Understand that things will inevitably change, and flexibility is key to adapting to new circumstances without losing momentum.
Key Takeaway is Awareness and Adaptability: If there is one key takeaway, it's that being aware of your team's health and developing mechanisms to support resilience are crucial to long-term success. Make sure to invest time and effort in creating and maintaining these systems.
Frameworks for Assessing co-founding teams
Once in a team, how do you maintain and optimise in real time? You should constantly be assessing the realtionship. A well-functioning co-founding team can be recognized across six primary factors: Alignment, Adaptability, Efficiency, Energy, Resilience, and Collaboration. Each factor can be measured on a scale from high to low, with varying impacts on team performance.
- Alignment
- High: Team members have a very clear sense of long-term direction for both the team and the broader organization.
- Medium: The team has a clear sense of direction, but some areas of misalignment exist, causing occasional disruptions.
- Low: There is little to no alignment on direction or tactics, often due to disagreements and lack of clarity within the team.
- Adaptability
- High: The team can easily change direction, objectives, and procedures with openness when needed, demonstrating flexibility.
- Medium: The team aspires to learn, grow, and change but struggles to act or react quickly in new circumstances.
- Low: The team is rigid and stuck in routines, with few successful initiatives for change, limiting growth and adaptability.
- Efficiency
- High: The team uses all available resources to achieve goals as efficiently as possible, maximizing productivity.
- Medium: The team gets things done and attempts to avoid wastefulness, but there are gaps in precision and available tools, limiting their full potential.
- Low: The team struggles to accomplish tasks efficiently, even when provided with adequate resources. Often, things don’t get done at all, reflecting severe inefficiency.
- Energy
- High: The team is highly productive, proactive, and action-oriented over a sustained period.
- Medium: The team is somewhat energized and responsive, springing into action when necessary but not consistently.
- Low: The team is passive, requiring external stimuli to initiate action.
- Resilience
- High: A strong team that not only withstands but also grows under external pressure and uncertainty.
- Medium: An adept team that can handle some pressure, though with occasional difficulty.
- Low: A fragile team that crumbles under pressure, struggling to overcome crises.
- Collaboration
- High: The team is tightly knit, mutually supportive, and demonstrates a strong team spirit.
- Medium: The team is amicable and partly supportive, but doesn't fully embody true collaborative efforts.
- Low: The team lacks cohesion, functioning more as a collection of individuals than a united group.
Tools and Practices for Team Success
Building a co-founding team requires intentional strategies and tools that foster strong team dynamics and alignment. Key tools include:
- Awareness
- Regular stocktake and assessment of the health and effectiveness of each co-founder. This ensures everyone is operating at their best and identifies areas for improvement.
- Use tools like team barometers to gauge sentiment and performance.
- Regular health checks within the co-founding team to assess morale and overall team sentiment.
- A weekly co-founding team barometer, where team members share things that are working well, areas that need improvement, and general sentiment. This keeps communication open and transparent.
- Set aside time for joint reflection and discussion, such as reviewing the highlights and lowlights of the week. This allows the team to address challenges and celebrate wins together, fostering stronger alignment.
- Feedback
- Developing a strong feedback culture is critical. This includes maintaining good hygiene in how feedback is given and received, ensuring it's constructive and leads to growth.
- Honesty, especially beyond what feels natural, is essential to building resilience within a co-founding team.
- Create an environment where radical honesty is expected. The goal is to improve results and, ultimately, the growth of each founder.
- Name the process to set the tone. For example, Pixar used the term “Braintrust” to foster the right setting for constructive feedback.
- Focus on both weaknesses and strengths, and sometimes emphasize weaknesses more. This cultivates a culture of continuous improvement, where each challenge is viewed as an opportunity to grow.
- Make feedback part of the team’s culture. Ensure that after every milestone, a team retrospective is held to keep momentum and encourage ongoing learning.
- Working Style
- Aligning on how, when, and where team members like to work helps avoid misunderstandings and builds stronger cohesion within the team.
- Ensure that co-founders spend in-person time together to build trust.
- Establish clear working hours and productive times, and respect each other's preferences.
- Seek a balance between how you like to work and how your co-founder prefers to work. Don’t always aim for someone who matches you exactly.
- Consider traits like decisiveness, autonomy, planning, proactivity, management, and dependability when evaluating working styles.
- Working hours, productive times, and preferred schedules are also critical to consider for harmonious teamwork.
- Be ready to work in person as much as possible during the early stages of building the company. Front-loading work in person helps solidify the foundation. Working remotely from day one often doesn’t work.
- If you're unsure of your own working style, ask others for observations or engage in critical thinking to better understand how you approach work.
- There are good resources on Manager vs Maker schedules.
- Balance
- Prioritizing regular interaction and time spent together outside of formal meetings helps build rapport and improve team chemistry.
- A drink, or hitting the Gym.
- Reflection
- Working with a coach as a forcing mechanism can deepen reflection and team growth, providing an outside perspective to support resilience and continuous development.
Conclusion
The journey to finding and maintaining the right co-founding relationship is challenging but essential. By focusing on values, vision, and complementary skills, and by prioritizing communication and trust, you can increase your chances of long-term success. Remember, the strength of your co-founding relationship will be one of the most critical factors in your startup’s trajectory.