How to Resolve Disagreements Between Co-Founders

My co-founder and I used to argue. A lot.

We’d argue about important things like marketing strategies and product features and employee hiring decisions. And we’d argue about stupid things like whether it’s better to build pitch decks using Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint (answer:?always PowerPoint).

Basically, if a topic could have multiple perspectives, we often managed to find opposing ones. Unfortunately for us and our startup, many of our debates devolved into full-tilt arguments that made us A) hate each other, and B) hate working on our company. Obviously, that kind of hatred wasn’t productive.

The tensions between my co-founder and I got so extreme at its peak that we even tried leveraging scarce company resources in order to bribe ourselves toward behaving more civilly. For example, my co-founder and I were (and still are!) passionate carnivores and loved eating at good steakhouses. However, back when cash was tight, ribeye and filet dinners were hard to justify. Despite our lack of money, we agreed our?company would buy us a nice dinner from our favorite steakhouse at the end of any week in which no argument lasted more than five minutes.

Over the span of two years, that incentive led us to precisely one steak dinner and a failed company.

I’m sharing this story because it’s not like we’re the only startup co-founders to have ever fought. In fact, I’m guessing the opposite is true. Every halfway decent set of startup co-founders in history have surely, from time-to-time, been at each other’s throats. It’s a natural outcome when you put passionate, intelligent people together in a high-stress, low-infrastructure environment like a startup. Everyone is dedicated to a singular cause, nobody knows the best way forward, but they all have opinions. The result is chaotic and often… well… antagonistic.

How can startup founders avoid this kind of wasteful and destructive in-fighting?

Differing opinions aren’t inherently bad

Unfortunately, co-founder arguments rarely deliver meaningful value to startups. At best, they unobtrusively peter out as the founders focus on more important things. However, even in that scenario, they leave a festering residue of spite, tension, and loathing that’s not good for anyone.

Because co-founder arguments are largely unproductive, avoiding them might seem like the best option, but trying to avoid arguments entirely can create its own set of problems. For example, when a company’s leadership is too respectful of each other’s viewpoints, they often lose the benefits of productive debate. Remember that those same differences of opinion that often lead to wasteful co-founder arguments are also a co-founding team’s biggest asset.

Put simply, having diverse perspectives on a leadership team is critical to startup success. Diverse perspectives allow startups to solve their most difficult challenges because, when something isn’t working — which happens often in #StartupLife — you need to try a new strategy. But if everyone on the team sees the world in a similar way and thinks the same things (or is too worried about the consequences of disagreeing), identifying effective alternate strategies becomes impossible.

In other words, the differences of opinion and perspective that so often devolve into co-founder fights and startup failures are also the assets that can make startups great. Knowing this, how can a startup avoid destructive arguments while cultivating an environment of productive disagreement?

The solution is easier than you think.?In fact, I can sum it up in one word:?data.

Stop believing and start knowing

That same co-founder I described earlier — the one I always fought with and, as a result, our company failed — we would go on to launch another, more successful company. We did it by figuring out how to turn our biggest weakness — our propensity for disagreeing — into our biggest asset.

My co-founder and I eventually learned that disagreeing with each other wasn’t our problem.?Our problem was that our disagreements were based on different beliefs, and those beliefs were rooted in a collection of ephemeral opinions rather than concrete evidence.?Basically, I would think I was right because my “feeling” about something seemed right, and he would think he was right because his “feeling” about something seemed right, and… well… we were stubborn, arrogant, naive, idiots who liked winning arguments and hated admitting we might not know something.

To be fair, I still am a stubborn, arrogant, naive, idiot (and so is my old co-founder), but that didn’t stop us from solving this particular problem. Eventually, my co-founder and I learned that anytime we disagreed about something, we had to support our respective positions using tangible data. If we already had the data we needed, we had to share it.?But most of the time, we didn’t have the data, so we started forcing ourselves to collect it.?That’s when our startup finally began getting traction.

For example, if my co-founder and I were debating the best tagline to include on a Facebook ad, rather than arguing for days about why one choice of words was better than another, we’d run a test. We’d launch two Facebook ads and see which performed better. Problem solved!

And, by the way, once we started running tests in order to base our arguments on data rather than beliefs, the outcomes of our tests were often roughly equivalent. As a result, we learned that many of our previous arguments had been more wasteful than?we’d even realized because neither of our beliefs were objectively better. And, yes, this made us feel like even bigger idiots.

As my co-founder and I matured, we learned we could apply our newfound culture of data collection to nearly every debatable decision. For example, when we argued about which potential job candidates to hire,?we realized we could hire multiple candidates on temporary “make good” contracts and see which ones actually performed better. In some cases, we wound up hiring more people than we’d initially intended because more than one was good. In other cases, we wound up releasing all the?hires because none of them worked out.

In that scenario as well as all the other situations where we leveraged?a “prove it” approach to decision making, the lesson was the same:?our beliefs and opinions didn’t matter.?What mattered were data and facts-based evidence.?Once we had those things, making good decisions became much easier, and our startup thrived. Our user base grew exponentially alongside our revenues. We raised millions of dollars in venture capital. And, most importantly, we actually got to enjoy working together, which is a big deal when you’re spending 80+ hours per week with someone.

The same could be true for your startup. Whenever you and your co-founders (or employees!) are arguing about something, always remember that the?disagreement itself isn’t the problem. The problem is that you’re trying to make decisions based on opinions and beliefs rather than concrete evidence.

The solution to these kinds of arguments isn’t to keep arguing. The solution is to stop whatever you’re arguing about and figure out how to acquire the data necessary to help you make the right decision.?Once you have real, actionable data, you’ll know the appropriate decision to make. More importantly, nobody will argue with that decision because it’ll clearly be the best decision for your startup, and that — more than the pride of winning an argument — is ultimately what matters most.

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on?Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on?Twitter?or subscribe to?Web Masters,?his podcast exploring digital entrepreneurship.