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A lot of start-ups fail because co-founders don't get along with each other. At CoCubes @vibhore_goyal and I learnt all this the hard way veering near the edge multiple times.
A thread on co-founder dynamics and what we did to maintain sanity and our friendship.
A thread on co-founder dynamics and what we did to maintain sanity and our friendship.
It works best if co-founders are best friends. Anything less and you are obviously starting on a weak footing. In our case we were best friends in college and had fought multiple times and tided over. But we still went through trial by fire when running @CoCubesTeam
For many years I would get defensive if Vibhore pushed me on why sales weren't meeting targets or how could we reduce expenses. But over time I realized that in a start-up it is good to have someone who you are answerable to. Once I started thinking like that things changed
One area we have seen of frequent fights is 'equity distribution' and 'salaries'. In our case this was sorted coz we were equal partners and owner the same equity and took the same salary for the entire duration of running the company. This is simplest to solve for.
Other common areas where fights can happen (and did happen with us) are 'media visibility' and 'strategy'. Vibhore and I had radically different views on these and now.
Your clearest indication that something is not going well is when you can't say what is on your mind to your co-founder.
If you find yourself in that position, go and talk. There is no other way. When you say it out loud, the tension disappears and you can work on it together. Else it will keep simmering and hurt your chances of success.
Here are a few things we did to maintain sanity and get through: we never disagreed in public. There were many times we didn't agree but we never cut-off each other publicly. We used these times to talk and fine-tune our relationship for the future.
Another thing which saved us was 'we kept each other's word'. Which meant if one of us had committed something to a team member, investor or a customer that meant that CoCubes had committed. And even if we disagreed we would back each other.
Over time we became mirrors of each other. We would start at opposite ends and convince each other of the argument and end up switching positions. It became funny.
It is easy to be on the same page when things are going well. When times are tough is when stress tends to spill over.
In those times for good or bad we prioritized our friendship over the company. We backed off and talked to each other and found a middle path. It is possible it compromised growth of the company but we got our friendship back on track first and then moved forward.
