How not to screw up co-founder relationships

We told each other we won’t fight.. we won’t fight.. but we ended up fighting and haven’t spoken since.?

I think he changed a lot during the course of the start-up, and we stopped seeing eye to eye. Hell, he even started living in another country without really discussing it!

We never really spoke about why we were building the venture; then when we had to pivot we had totally different understandings of our origin story. It was unbelievable.

Founder relationships are not just the leading cause of the failure of growth stage start-ups but also the primary source of frustration and pain in the journey of entrepreneurs everywhere. Similar to our troubles with talking about our relationship issues, founder issues remain under the surface eating away at the energy and creativity of founders everywhere. Founding a venture is anyways a super lonely journey and suffering founder issues is a special kind of hell. I speak from the experience of having worked with multiple co-founders (across four different ventures), contributed greatly to their pain and mine, mediated issues between other founder groups, and learnt a great deal from all of this.

In the last decade there have been efforts to bell this cat by venture capital firms and other investors who have recognised that money can go down the tube even in the case of an excellent startup if founder relationships go south. However, not every start-up is a venture funded start-up and not every venture funded start-up is funded by VCs with that bent of mind. Many VCs have serious founder issues themselves!

That being said I wish to share some insights on founder relationships that I feel can help young start-ups in India. I want to bucket this into five types of challenges that emerge most commonly in founder relationships:

1. Failure to define and redefine roles;
2. Failure to define systems of accountability;
3. Failure to define ownership in the company in an adaptive and realistic way;?
4. Failure to practise the rituals of communication and collective well-being; and
5. Failure to handle a crisis with grace.

I will also spend some time on what I see as some of the root issues that underlie all of the above.

1. Failure to define roles and redefine roles

In the beginning everything feels like something that can be figured out on the fly. And this is right to some extent. But it is also a recipe for disaster. Building a ritual of designating roles, as well as reshaping them where needs arise is critical. It is not in the habit of young founders to say ‘let’s do this because it would be a good practice for us going forward’ – it seems much more relevant to talk about all the other urgent and cool stuff such as the product or the market, but the investment in role definition and frameworks to revisit those roles is vital. This is especially relevant because it is natural that roles will change. As a co-founder and an equity holder interested in the continued growth of the venture, one has to maintain a distance to ask the questions “Am I the best person for this role?” and, even more importantly, “Am I still the best person for this role?”. It is often the case that one reaches the limits of their competency and there are better people to take the baton forward.?

Here is some language that can be used -

• I think it would be a good idea if….
• Let’s make sure that we check-in….
• I really want to hear from you if you think we should do this differently…
• Would you like to take on another role…
• I think I should focus on something else..
• Is this a better fit for someone else…
• I think this is a better fit for…

2. Failure to define systems of accountability

Trust is integral to the founder relationship but so are rituals of accountability. When sensitive moments arise personal trust perceptions can often get compromised but trusted mechanisms followed consistently can become a source of strength. Hence it is absolutely vital to create a culture of accountability where accountability is not demanded by other founders but offered by every founder to the other. This ensures that what follows is a display of self-awareness and self recognition. At low points when someone feels that they have not been able to deliver or do their role well it allows the person to say that I don’t think this is working, what could I do differently etc. That is not a failure of leadership but a form of it. This form of mutual feedback will then define the culture of feedback in the organisation because if you implement feedback only for others then the inter-founder feedback will always remain relatively weak. Founders often expect from others what they do not offer up themselves.

Here is some language that can be used to enable this -

• I thought of three / five questions we will ask of each other every week…
• I’m not doing this particularly well…
• I need to get better at x and y…
• Can we figure out how we can get better at x and y…
• I’m really feeling good about this…
• I suck at this….

3. Failure to define ownership in the company in an adaptive and realistic way

This failure repeats itself again and again and again. People usually begin founder relationships seeing themselves as “all equal founders”. The intent is age-old and powerful but we run into the following issues - not everyone cares as much for the idea, not everyone cares in the same way for the idea, not everyone has the same work discipline, smart and hard work look different for different people, and things keep changing!?

Nevertheless there are principles that can be kept in mind -?

A. Honour your commitments - even if they don’t always seem fair

If you and your cofounders have sat down and agreed on the stakes you will hold and the conditions, if any, by which they will be changed then honour that. If you never specified any conditions by which they may change - though I strongly recommend that you do - but have reached a point where you feel the changes are necessary then raise that point with grace and complete recognition that this is something that was not discussed earlier. Angst doesn’t help.

B. If something changes fundamentally own it - don’t wait for another person to call it out

If something changes at your end eg. you can no longer be 100% involved or discharge your responsibilities as before, then before this point is raised by others, own it and bring it up for discussion. Very often there is a phase of lingering lack of communication that rapidly deteriorates relationships. If you’re worried about protecting your self-interest then you can even suggest solutions that you consider to be win-win for everyone.

C. Have trusted intermediaries

A real trump card to defuse tensions, have difficult conversations, and maintain cultures of communication and well-being, is having a trusted elder(s) in a group. By group I don’t mean they have to be co-founders but they could be advisors on an advisory board or a director. And by ‘elder’ I don’t mean older. I just mean someone that all co-founders recognize to have experience, perspective and wisdom. The right elder, I have seen in many cases, can enable the founder group to maintain balance, grow as leaders, and navigate complex situations.

4. Failure to practise rituals of communication and well-being

If there is a magic wand that is capable of dissolving complex situations it is the seed of self awareness in founders that enables them to reflect on things from a distance. The Conscious Leadership Group recently put out this great chart -?

It is hard to conjure up courage and grace when you’re handling a crisis but you can reap the benefit of many years of investment into communication and well-being that can help you mitigate crisis as things move forward. Regular check-ins with a structured agenda that draw out more hairy issues and also ask questions in the realm of feelings, help to develop the muscle to navigate more complex issues in the future. I speak at the end of the article on the critical issue of wellbeing which is essential to get to that acceptance and trust top-half in the image above.

5. Failure to Handle a Crisis with Grace

Despite all these efforts founder relationships may still break down. Maybe you come to see things very differently and while you respect each other you are no longer pulling in the same direction. Maybe it's death by a thousand cuts and the relationship has deteriorated because of unhealthy conflict. You look at all the points made above in this article and think that hindsight is 20/20. Even so there is a fifth principle that can serve us well in life - handling a full blown conflict with grace and intelligence. One clear answer is to use tools such as mediation. Mediation has become increasingly acceptable in founder conflicts. It’s a bit like saying we didn’t have a trusted intermediary during our founding journey but we could find one now to help us untangle the mess. Mediation of founder disputes is now a specialist craft form. It allows for founders to recognise that interests can diverge and there is a reasonable and life-positive way of settling the issue.

The Heart of the Matter - Personal and Collective Well-being?

At the end of the day when one looks at all of these things it is easy to see them as separate issues. The truth of the matter is that the real investments into founder relationships are not about getting any of the five things above done right alone. They are fundamentally about -

• Conscious leadership
• Personal and collective well-being
• Authentic communication

Like any high-stakes relationship, founder relationships expose weaknesses in these fundamental human capacities. You can be ultra-rational but when the going gets tough all the under-investment in these areas comes to bite you in the you-know-where. There is no escaping the inner work. The mind is a wee little boat floating on an ocean of emotions.?

I know of a fast growing start-up where every senior leader is expected to do a 10 day vipassana meditation, and its daily practices. In fact, the biggest advocate of this approach has been a trusted intermediary on their board (the ‘elder’) with a longstanding commitment to inner work. This may seem unpalatable to some of you, because it pushes for something that has historically been within the realm of the personal, but I believe that this perspective misses a critical insight - the personal is the professional. If you as a group of people are not making investments into your personal well-being then all commitments towards personal leadership development, and collective leadership development, are on shaky ground.

Some organizational tools that may assist in this regard are a charter for personal and collective wellbeing wherein there is also a clear commitment to rituals and practices of inner work, a values statement that addresses these priorities, and an investment into a relationship with a leadership or wellbeing coach that can periodically strengthen the organization.?

“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.”

― Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times

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Great People and Organizations that can help

• Manish Shrivastava, Social Presencing Theatre, Developing Personal and Collective Leadership
• Arun Wakhlu, Pragati Leadership, Developing Personal and Collective Leadership
• Navgati, Developing Feedback Systems for Organizations
• CAMP, Mediation in Inter-founder Disputes
• YCM, Workplace Mediation and Conflict Coaching for Organisations, Developing Team Culture to Convert Conflicts into Growth Opportunities?

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Sachin Malhan is the co-founder of Agami. Agami was founded in 2018 with the objective of accelerating innovation in law and justice. It has pursued its mandate with a focus on discovering new ideas, curating and connecting critical actors across silos, and telling the story of a different future for law and justice. Agami’s most significant learning has been that the most important work we can do is to strengthen the leadership of innovators and change-minded people in law and justice. Before Agami, Sachin was the Executive Director of the Changemakers program of leading non-profit Ashoka. Sachin has previously co-founded three ventures in India – test prep pioneer Law School Tutorials (LST, now called CL LST), Rainmaker, a learning and talent platform that ultimately spun off Vahura and mylaw.net, and Inclusive Planet, a policy and platform venture focused on greater literary access for the visually impaired. For his work in technology, media, social impact and education, Sachin became an INK Fellow in 2010. Sachin is a graduate of National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and began his career with law firm Amarchand Mangaldas in their Mumbai offices. Sachin cares deeply about the aspiration and potential of every young person in India. He can be reached at [email protected]?