Co-founder dating advice. Kiss, Marry, or Kill?

Dating is frustrating, starting a business is hard, finding the right co-founder is almost impossible.

I grew two successful businesses with ex-girlfriends (literally dating my co-founders), but that’s another story for another blog (and my therapist).

The dating metaphor is particularly apt for teaming up with a co-founder for a number of reasons.

1. You’re in it for the long haul. If things go well, potentially decades!
2. You should get to know each other, and start with a first date. If that goes well, that may lead to a second date, and if that goes well, there’s a good likelihood that you’re both going to get fμcked!
3. You both need something from each other, and you both have something to give.

A relationship is give and take. Best buddies may have a lot in common, but it’s a poor criterion for a co-founder. If you’re starting a business with 2 people, it’d be an odd strategy to choose someone exactly like you.

Even the Stranger Things kids chose different classes when they played Dungeons & Dragons!

So far, so obvious, but it’s hard to be so honest about yourselves.

To know your weaknesses, know your deficiencies, and be able to communicate them while simultaneously convincing someone to make a career leap of faith for an expensive multi-year commitment with you...

Your prize for achieving all this is: having to work with the weirdo you have nothing in common with!

So how do you keep the spark in the relationship going, to get you through the tough times?

Well, every relationship has its own dynamic, but here’s what’s working for us.

Equality & fairness.

We’re equal 50 - 50 partners.

When we’re ready to take on the next two co-founders, it’s going be on equal terms too.

That’s just how we’ve decided to roll.

That split was hard thought through but easily negotiated for a number of reasons.

Mostly because we share the same values.

Neither of us wants to have a boss, no one should have the ultimate power, nor the final say.

I understand other companies that have one major shareholder and a senior management team that each takes a much smaller slice of the cake.

Sometimes, there’s just the “gentleman’s agreement” that as long as the underlings are always monogamous, they might get some cake if it ever gets shared.

I understand that in some cultures, men have a harem of multiple wives.

I’m just not convinced that the wives enjoy it as much.

As long as everyone’s happy. I suppose it’s none of my damn business, but it’s not something I’d ever want (just imagine having 10 mothers-in-law).

There have been some famously objectionable cases where not everyone involved was happy:

Have your cake, and share it? Jacob Zuma had six wives, one of whom tragically ended her own life.

Warren Jeffs had 87 wives at the time of his arrest. He married 10 of them before they turned 16.

So being equal partners seems weird to some, but the alternatives seem weirder to us.

There are some senior people in tech (unhappy with their incumbent employers) that have approached us, and rightfully deserve a lion's share of the equity.

But then they'd be our boss, and however much they deserve that title (and however much their current employer is undervaluing them) that's not the collaboration we're looking for.

Our why is clear.

You're welcome to join us, but we're not looking for anyone to own us.

The arrangement has its challenges.

We both benefit from being so different and having complimentary domain expertise.

I can (and do) have opinions on product, both on our own and on those of our clients.

If I’m not convinced by Tom’s strategy or reasoning, we’re comfortable disagreeing respectfully. We’ll argue like we’re right, and listen like we’re wrong. (Thanks Dom, I’ve stolen it).

I’m a firm believer that:

If Tom can’t convince me, then he’s got some more work to do, and if it’s important enough (and we have enough time) we’ll go another round.

I’m exhausting to argue with because I love it, but it’s proven surprisingly useful for when a potential client or investor asks us a difficult question and finds out we’ve fought and thought it through from most angles.

Likewise, Tom often has opinions on marketing and sales, and I respect when he cares enough to raise them with me. He’s often right, because he’s a smart guy that thinks things through, but either way, the conversation creates beneficial creative friction.

It helps that usually neither of us is right or wrong per se, it’s just a case of what’s a priority, and when it should be done.

For example, our current website is pretty ugly for a company offering a marketing consultancy service. But we’ve got more client work than there are days in the week, so it’ll have to wait.

Our Whys

The other reason it’s been working for us (so far) is that we have the same values.

I don’t need to worry that Tom’s working as hard as me, because we both work as hard as we can, it’s our default setting.

We both focus on what’s important and don’t sweat the small stuff. We have different definitions of what the small stuff is, but that’s part of our domain expertise.

These are a work in progress (as is everything is for an agile startup) but here are our shared values that we apply to everything we do with our team and with our clients.

If we’re not making mistakes, we’re not trying hard enough.

We love that we've built a company around our ability to:

A.) Take chances

B.) Experiment

C.) Learn

D.) Work hard, and work fast

E.) Push ourselves and our clients outside of our comfort zones.

All of which means mistakes are an expected part of the process.

If we anticipate mistakes, we can continuously learn to handle them better as a team.

I’ll save the discussion of the rest of our values for another blog, but just so I’m not teasing anyone that’s read this far, here they are:

Honesty Stops Mistakes from Becoming Failures

Think Long Term, Act Now.

Argue Like You’re Right, Listen Like You’re Wrong

I would love to hear your feedback. On our values, on our co-founder relationship, on this blog!

Is it a terrible idea for a small startup co-founder to be this honest?

Is it self absorbed to post stuff like this?

Do you think it doesn’t belong on LinkedIn? (I’ve read that in the comments so often, they should make it one of the reaction buttons!)

Thanks for reading!