Cofounder Conflicts

When ideas outpace communication

I had read that one of the reasons why startups failed had to do with cofound conflicts, at that moment I didn’t understand it fully. In my mind, I just thought to myself that it had to do with greed for power, diverging visions, or maybe an event that led to internal conflicts. And at that moment I resolved myself not to let that be the reason my startup would fail. I thought to myself that there is no shortage of ideas out there, we need not fight over anything. Maybe if things get to a certain level yeah, fighting would be justified, but fighting over something which hadn’t even taken off yet just sounded silly to me. I mean, what's the point of fighting over nothing, this just leads to both sides finally not getting anything in the end just because of overinflated egos.

I still believed there were many reasons why cofounders could end up in conflicts, however, I didn’t imagine that would be because there wasn’t a contract between them. Don’t get me wrong, it's not like I underestimated the importance of having a contract. I just thought to myself, you are just two freshmen from college with a dream, why do we have to get so formal so soon? We understand what needs to be done, and we get along with each other, so what's the big deal with contracts? As it turns out, problems tend to come up from even the most unexpected places.

Ideas outpace communication

We often tend to misunderstand what we have in our heads and reality, often we assume that the person we are working with understands the picture of ideas we have in our head. The issue is that even us, we don’t understand the picture of ideas we have in our heads. There is just a persistent feeling that everything makes sense even when it doesn’t, and you can see this manifest itself when you start to articulate those ideas. You quickly realize that you are running out of words, and you have to continue your reflection, even though you thought you had everything figured out.

When founders come together and start working on a project, they communicate a lot on their ideas and develop them as they go, problems start sipping in because their continuous reflection might not keep up with their communication. Each person can easily come up with new ideas that might take the project in totally different directions or be in direct conflict with each other’s ideas. Even if they know how to solve disagreements, if communication doesn’t catch up with ideation, then eventually they’ll go way too far off from each other.

No matter who your cofounder is, you can’t always come to the same conclusions or ideas all the time. A project will have to handle so many factors, conditions, and events that will require decisions to be taken. Even knowing a person for decades doesn’t guarantee to you what they’ll do or if that will be enough to solve the problem. A perfect example is trusting a kind person to make the kind decision, except that in business sometimes the kind decision isn’t the right one. You might have to lay off people for the business to survive, meanwhile, this person by their kind nature won’t want to do that, instantly that’s an area of disagreement.

Why contracts

Contracts are a materialization of our ideas and an articulation of all our thoughts concisely which can be understood by everybody who reads them. Your ideas can easily change, as they do on a daily basis, but a contract isn’t so easily changed. It outlines clearly what, how, when, and where for each person involved in the endeavor with very little or no ambiguity. A reason why people enter into conflicts is because they don’t have the same understanding of what is expected from them and what they expect from the other person. You can imagine a company where everybody did what they wanted or what they believed to be the right thing. That company is not going to go very far obviously but in the current schema of things, it's a contract that determines what everybody is supposed to do, in this case, a work contract. It's also on this basis that people are judged, evaluated, recruited, or fired, and not on the basis of what they think or feel.

Unfortunately, as cofounders in a startup, we tend to operate based on trust and a limited understanding of what the other person has in mind. We want to believe we understand each other and can predict what the other person would do, which is true for the most part, but where the problem comes in is that people evolve. Circumstances may lead people to change from whom we knew them to be to becoming different, here are some examples of circumstances that can change people unpredictably: stress, money, hardships, success, corruption, wealth, accidents, bribes etc You might think you know a person, but you don’t know what they’ll become once they’ve gone through any of these.

Conclusion

There is a reason why standards were established and why there are ways of doing certain things, the main reason is that through time they’ve proven to be the best chance for success. Now it's true that we can try some new things or do things differently, but we would be taking a chance with luck and ill luck, basically rolling the dice to see where it falls. Of course, I won’t say to friends to go and sign contracts before even beginning a project. But atleast I think you should be able to articulate your ideas in a document before spending years of your life working on it. So you have a better understanding of what you expect not just from your partner but also from yourself.

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