Ask HN: How to overcome the fear of doing more than your co-founder?
The first time I had a co-founder things didn't work out, exactly because I felt I was doing a lot more than my co-founder. For instance, once we had the prototype done we started pitching it to clients, but for every 10 clients I pitched the product my co-founder would pitch to 1. I decided to abort the project as I didn't want to do 80% of the work while earning only 50% of the profits. In this case my co-founder was also a developer.
After that experience I had the opportunity to co-found products with other people, but I always backed down for the same reason, I was afraid the other person wouldn't be able to keep up with me, so I would end up doing most of the hard work. This fear gets amplified when the co-founder is not a technical person, which means I'll certainly need to take care of the development aspect myself, while the other person focuses on the business aspects, which in my opinion are much less demanding on software related projects (at least in the early days).
And to be clear, I do know how to manage the business aspects too, so it's not like without a business co-founder I would be lost.
My questions:
1. Psychological Aspect: How do I overcome this fear?
2. Practical Aspect: How do I structure things with my co-founders so that I don't end up doing most of the hard work?
68 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadFor example, this is a community of developers but I'm sure on a business forum you'd find many people to disagree with your experience that development is harder.
It's also worth realising that without the business side of things, there is no business - even if you have good software. Similarly, your co-founder can't sell air, so he needs a good product grounding the business development. You may be working unequally, but the dependence from one to the other is equal.
Even inequivalent exchange can benefit both parties. It's a specific case of the general idea of the 'laws of value'. Take a look at the essay International exchange and the law of value by Isaak Dashkovskij.
http://libcom.org/library/international-exchange-law-value-i...
"In the past, when I've co-founded projects;
I felt I was doing a lot more than my co-founder. For instance, once we had the prototype done we started pitching it to clients, but for every 10 clients I pitched the product my co-founder would pitch to 1. I decided to abort the project as I didn't want to do 80% of the work while earning only 50% of the profits."
If the response is something like "Well, I'm really just looking for a fun project to do after work..." keep looking - you have different objectives and motivations.
As an aside, the best co-founder relationships are formed on complimentary skill sets. You can do what they can't (or struggle with), and vice versa. As such, I would encourage you to find a sales person/designer/hustler, as opposed to another developer.
2. Very clear upfront communication of exactly your previously stated concerns over coffee or (ideally) drinks, and then vesting.
Also, this statement is completely, painfully wrong: "while the other person focuses on the business aspects, which in my opinion are much less demanding on software related projects"
I would never co-found a project or company with someone who ever said this to me. You're saying to the other person "No matter how good you are, or what partnerships you make, or how you market this project, or which key customers you close, or what relevant market research you do, or who you hire, or which investors you close, your performance can never measure up to the demanding schedule and work of the developer," which is a pretty bad place to start forming a partnership with another person.
On the face of it, this advice seems reasonable. But this advice will result in precisely the asymmetry to OP is worried about. If you have a technology product, I strongly discourage you from taking on a non-technical cofounder.
I made a huge mistake co-founding a company with someone whom I thought had a skill set that would compliment mine. He was, of course, a non-technical. While I coded for 90 hours a week trying to build an MVP, he did thought experiments, worried about competitors, and fretted about the color of our logo. In short, he did very little to move the product forward other than arbitrarily tweaking design specifications (before we had MVP and were even able to A/B test or validate with users). It was an extremely counterproductive and demoralizing experience.
This may sound like an edge case, but I meet people all the time whose startups failed because the team couldn't get along. This is usually caused by one person feeling like they're doing all the work. And that's usually because one person IS doing all the work - the other person is a non-technical cofounder, and can't do much meaningful work, only look busy by trying to get twitter followers, having lunch meetings with reporters, and doing competitor analysis - all work that is meaningless if you don't have an MVP you can use to validate and iterate toward product-market fit.
My advice is simple: find a technical cofounder who also has the confidence to pitch. Find a technical cofounder who can help validate an MVP and iterate it to product-market fit. Find a technical cofounder who isn't daunted by needing to pick up new skills. This is a startup. You're looking for generalists, not specialists. Whether someone can code is a good litmus test for whether they are serious about doing tech startups, or merely dabbling.
You found a terrible co-founder. A terrible co-founder, business or otherwise, will generate terrible outcomes.
One thing that is very important to understand is that a great business co-founder is as rare (if not rarer) than a great technical co-founder. If you happen to find someone like that, having an attitude that they won't do any work, and they won't "do much meaningful work", will not endear them to you.
If they're a great business co-founder, they will have nearly unlimited options, much like great technical co-founders. They might also have great market knowledge, plenty of inside connections, and experience on what to do, and how to do it. And as you brought it up, experience on how to get to product market fit. All of which is invaluable. Further, and please don't take this the wrong way, but their experience in connecting with and evaluating people might have prevented you from choosing the clearly incompetent person that you ended up selecting.
Having specialization early on was a mistake. It was a difficult situation, and it wasn't entirely his fault that there was, for long stretches of time, little for him to do.
A startup cycle goes something like this: initial theory -> MVP -> validation of theory using MVP -> iterating to product-market fit -> scale
Even in that highly oversimplified flow, there are a lot of shifts from "product mode" to "development mode". Most of these steps must happen sequentially. If only half of the team is fully engaged in any given step, you get a lot of slack.
There's a joke that first startups should hire a bunch of developers to build the product. Then they should fire the developers and hire a bunch of salespeople to sell the product.
Which begs the question - why not just hire developers who can sell, and avoid paying all that unemployment?
Larger organizations can get away with having specialists onboard. Smaller organizations (2-3 people) can't afford this luxury.
Your advice would hold for a later stage startup, but it is unreasonable advice for an early stage startup.
To give two sentences of background, I've been running businesses for 13 years, and running a startup for 4 years. The first business I built by myself from nothing, and the second I built alongside my technical co-founder.
Firstly I'm concerned that you seem to think that I'm suggesting finding a 'specialist' business co-founder. Being a co-founder is the exact opposite of specialisation. If you're a co-founder period, you do ANYTHING it takes to move things forward, no exceptions, ifs, ands or buts.
Also, without meaning to be picky, I believed you identified your co-founder as terrible. Someone who, as you described, believes that doing 'thought experiments' and trying to get twitter followers is the appropriate thing that a business co-founder should be doing in an early stage startup, is objectively a terrible business co-founder.
If your business co-founder is doing his job properly, there should never be any slack. Exactly the same as a technical co-founder. Companies, especially early stage companies, can and must be doing product mode and develop mode simultaneously.
I've never heard that joke, but as you grow your company and get more customers on board, who have more requirements, it's pretty important to have both salespeople and developers working in tandem to build out a company.
I agree with you that larger organisations can afford having specialists and smaller organisations cannot.
9 years later, when you were looking for a cofounder, you decided to go with a technical cofounder.
You can talk all you want, but at the end of the day, you chose to bring on a second technical cofounder (the first being yourself) over the business cofounder that you are recommending the OP seek out.
N.b. by technical cofounder, I don't necessarily mean someone with a PhD in Computer Vision. I mean someone who can productively write API integrations and use whatever tools are needed (e.g. Rails, Meteor, Xcode) to build the product.
I can't code. I'm not a technical co-founder. My first business was not a software business, it was an IT infrastructure business.
In my first business, I discovered a need in the Japanese market for a good invoicing/document management software. It came about through me building a crappy invoice management system, and showing it to other Japanese business owners.
It was a little scary to work seriously on this, since there were no competitors, hence possibly no market.
However, I went out and did the following:
a) Designed and had built a crappy version of the software that was functional, but not elegant or scalable.
b) Talked with nearly a hundred potential users of this software to find out how they're currently solving this problem, and to try to get a sense of the market and the potential demand.
c) Found a group of people who were very interested in buying this software.
So by the time I found my co-founder, I had already invested hundreds of hours, and tens of thousands of dollars. However, I had a working prototype, many potential customers, and a good feel of the market.
It was a LOT of work. When people dismiss business co-founders as not doing a lot of work, or not doing meaningful work, it's both very irritating and also leads me to believe they've never worked with a 'real' business co-founder.
I could have made a strong argument for more equity, but when it comes to actually building the product, there is still a tremendous amount of risk, and if you want someone to be as dedicated to it as you are, I would generally advise being generous with equity.
Naturally, as things move forward, it makes sense to revise the equity if the situation drastically changes, such as you committing full-time, and them not being able to, or interested to, etc.
At the end of the day though, equity discussions are more of an art than a science, and everyone needs to feel happy and looked after - including, of course, yourself.
That's a hard one... and it's hard to offer advice because it's very situation specific. I might be able to help, or at least act as a sounding board if you want to hop on Skype and have a chat. My email address is in my profile!
At the very least, if there are two technical co-founders, one has to spend a lot of their time doing business activities.
Very interesting topic in my opinion.
The idea that the business aspect is in any way 'much less demanding' is like chalk on the blackboard of my brain. This is not an idea or attitude that will serve you either in life, or in trying to find a great co-founder.
You could make the exact opposite argument about the technical aspect, since in startup land there's no point building something until you've validated the customer requirement for the solution you're working on, and then ideally talked to 20-50-100 potential customers.
Have a non-technical co-founder source real customers to validate the MVP.
Non-technical cofounders can be in constant contact with the market generating your alpha and beta users so that when you launch you are generating cashflows to help sustain your business. You don't even need to have an MVP to get a potential customer waiting to try the first version of the product. All you need is an idea and to get in front of customers with the idea. That way you can get feedback from them the entire time you are developing, not just when you have a product.
Non-technical cofounders could also be establishing relationships with investors and partners that could accelerate your business. It sounds like your co-founder just didn't have a good idea of how they could really contribute to getting a sustainable business.
Marketing, promoting, sales, accounting, law, networking, researching... These are all things that I as a developer wouldn't want to deal with, even if I had the time to deal with them.
I'd advise spending as much time as possible, and trying to work together on some smaller projects before making the plunge.
Oh, as a minor note, instead of saying "I decided to abort the project as I didn't want to do 80% of the work while earning only 50% of the profits."
I would smooth that out to something like, "After some discussions on the amount of time we were both able to commit, in the end it made sense to stop working together. It seemed like the best choice since I was able and willing to spend a lot more time than he/she was, so we ended up parting ways amicably."
Assuming of course, that is what happened..!
For the first question, I have a few suggestions, probably that you will not find appealing.
First, do try some introspection, especially with a view toward truly analyzing whether "driving hard": a) means what you think it means (in the specific context of your projects) and b) is a working solution for you to accomplish your goals--I'm loathe to invoke canned/cliched nonsense, but sometimes "work smarter, not harder" actually does apply; c) is something you would do regardless (that is, are you the kind of person who wants to solve a problem, or are you more after the thrill of "driving hard" in and of itself, and so no matter what your partner(s) might do, you're going to drive that much harder).
Second, seriously consider the possibility that what you need is an assistant/employee and not a co-founder. That is, consider that the breadth and depth of the projects you're interested in, with respect to the real size of the problem and the amount of effort necessary to produce the solution, just aren't as "big" as you think they are. It may be that the problems you're solving are solvable by "one person plus a little help", and don't need more than one person "driving hard." In this case, since you seem to enjoy "driving hard," you're looking for the wrong kind of partnership: you want somebody to pass off parts of the project to, but you still want to control the overwhelming majority of development.
Third, seriously stop and think a moment about your statement regarding how demanding "the business aspects" are. I'm going to be viciously blunt here: your question reads like you have a real ego problem and, unfortunately, at the same time somewhat ironically that you lack the understanding that "the business aspects" are actually meaningful if you want to have a "big" success (for certain values of "big"). Getting them done is not trivial, and certainly can be at least as demanding as the technical components of a product. That's intentionally vague because, frankly, your question is (we don't know what you consider a "big problem" is, what "good money" means, etc.). You're "doing fine financially" as a "developer/entrepreneur," so that is an indication you have at least some idea of what the non-technical "business aspects" of this industry are. Maybe you should try to study them so you have a more mature understanding, and therefore are less inclined to be so utterly dismissive of non-technical co-founders.
I'll give this some more thought.
That's a very odd relationship - typically, the CEO pitches, perhaps with the aid of their co-founder. I don't think teams often split up pitches and each go do their own. Although, that strikes me as potentially a good thing to try if there isn't a clear best talker on the team.
There are many more details to this incredibly interesting question.
You can only find out how the dynamics of the team will work once you try it, so work with people you already know, or try out new people for an extended period of time before comitting.
Have a written scorecard with specific team member accountabilities, review weekly.
The People Component, getting the right people in the right seats will be a your most critical task. It's helpful to understand your core strengths vi-a-vis your co-founders. And making sure everyone is operating in areas of their unique abilities.
Recommend reading Traction by Gino Wickman > http://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/193...
This seems like the business equivalent of judging performance based on lines of code written.
This statement is potentially an indicator that you're not great at fairly measuring others' contributions.
If he's doing all the code AND most of the pitching, I think that his fear is justified.
If he's thinking that the code is more important than the business early on...maybe. Both need to be there in spades but there are probably more good business people floating around than there are coders.
What he probably wants is a business unicorn who can either code or at least understand data normalization - and why not, higher success rate that way and lower co-founder friction.
[0] Http://slicingpie.com
If you must absolutely have a co-founder, then I would find someone else who is technical. Their skillset should complement yours, i.e. if you are a GUI developer they should be a backend developer. Of course finding a developer who is serious is another matter. Most people talk big when it's just an idea, and they are fantasizing about the success like one does with a lottery ticket. It's quite another thing when you have to keep at it, like I have alone for almost 2 years.
There's innumerable scenarios we can concoct but I think the point is that there's no industrial-labor model for quantifying "effort" in a knowledge-based business.
As a software developer my value increases exponentially beyond the menial tasks I face at my job as I learn to curate good ideas, cultivate processes for generating new ones, and avoiding bad ideas. Any attempt to quantify my value based on lines of code, number of repository commits, or any other indicator is essentially meaningless without context. I may only make a single commit after a couple of weeks that changes two files and less than a dozen lines of code... but the network effects of the efficiency I just introduced allows to process N^k more data points per second which may pad your bonus with a couple of extra zeroes in the next quarter.
So I would recommend:
1. Learn how to value people differently. They bring more to the table than just a warm body.
2. Model the contractual obligations and profit sharing based on the core values of the business. Does working 1 hour have a directly positive impact on profits of some constant (or near-constant) amount? Split profits on hours worked. Is it more ephemeral based on the experience and qualities of the individual? Split it based on responsibility and risk (as a rule of thumb).
One problem remains: finding people who can close big clients or investors over a couple of phone calls is pretty hard. Identifying them upfront might be even harder!
There are a few solutions for your fear (i.e. in your head). One is don't get involved in 50/50 relationships -- you'd be surprised how understanding folks are about this.
I helped start a company with some friends back in 2006 and right away it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to commit to being involved full-time. I was still involved, and I helped get the thing off the ground, but we all knew I wasn't going to be able to make the time commitment necessary to be an equal partner in the business. So I wasn't! The CEO took a larger stake in the business and I took a much smaller stake -- we were both totally OK with this, as it fairly reflected efforts put in. (BTW - this company is now a successful venture-funded company in SV and the CEO remains one of my closest friends -- I'm a 'friend of the company', visit their offices regularly, and there isn't an ounce of bad blood among any party whatsoever).
The other thing to think about if you do go the 50/50 route is that different folks have different types of contributions, and even though the hours may seem imbalanced. For example, if you pitch 8/10 customers and your partners pitches 2/10 -- BUT...your partner lines up the funding / does all of the recruiting / balances the books if you have no accounting skills / etc., consider that raw hours might not be the best measure of "effort put in".
So it really boils down to this: Either go 50/50 and be comfortable that you're each making essential contributions even though hours might not be the same, or don't go 50/50 and instead have equity reflect contributions.
How would you barter between product development and sales?
How about if the sales person worked a day a week but closed ten times as many sales as the full time dev?
What if you got a co-founder who investors trusted from prior experience that drove them to actually invest?
How about someone leaving college versus someone who could earn several $100k on the open market?
Apparently[1] teams tend to do better than loan founders, and ultimately whatever you put together has to be tuned to what would motivate the other members of the team to stick around as long as you need them to in order that value is created. I don't believe there is a cookie cutter that fits.
[1] Somewhere in Disciplined Entreprenuership, Bill Autlet, MIT
This will twist the incentives to align everybody.
You have to be bitten by this a couple of times before vesting starts to make sense, after all why would I not just get all my equity upfront. The worst I heard was a founder walking away with 30% of the company 9 days after the company incorporated.Whether a business person will be able to contribute equally depends strongly on the type of project you start and where you are going to find customers.
You said that you are doing well financially and aren't starting these projects because of money. Then who cares if you "only" get 50% of the company? Your goal and intention is to solve a big problem. Get focused on that. The world is gonna pay you back in so many other ways than your 50%.
The other piece of advice is try to be really picky with your co-founders. Find ones that you trust and have worked with before or can get amazing references about. That way you know that he'd do his job the best way possible regardless of how many hours he puts in.
I hope this helps.
>Having a co-founder is very important and necessary to achieve this goal because your business will run into a number of roadblocks that you need a partner to help you go through it.
The most likely issue and road block for an early stage startup, especially one where founders are already doing well financially, is actually co-founder trouble.
> However, whether or not your co-founder works as hard as you is really irrelevant.
I cringe when I hear advice like this. I have been there. It has been one of the most demoralizing and depressing experiences of my entire life. Working your ass off for something while seeing your co-founder not really giving a shit simply doesn't work unless you intend to make a complete idiot out of yourself. Startups aren't socialist communities. Anyone who signs up should be aware of that.
> Then who cares if you "only" get 50% of the company?
Well then why not give up all of the company and give all of the shares to your co-founder slacking off? Company stake isn't only about the money. It is equally about control and about capital. Imagine having 50% for the "main" founder, 20% for the co-founder and 30% owned by angels / VCs who actually put assets into the company. Sounds like a better deal to me...
> The world is gonna pay you back in so many other ways than your 50%.
I am not sure how to express utmost disagreement with this. In the case of success you will get paid back exactly what has been agreed to in writing. Nobody will ever consider you the "spiritual" owner or founder of the company just because you say you worked harder. But everybody will consider you the real founder if your equity stake is higher. Simple as that.
> The other piece of advice is try to be really picky with your co-founders. Find ones that you trust and have worked with before or can get amazing references about.
Yes, this is good advice. However a startup can bring out really bad aspects of one's personality. Sometimes aspects you didn't know existed before you started the startup. Make sure you pick someone you know is loyal and handles stress well. These are the most important aspects of co-founder picking.
I have thought for a long time that a good choice for a 50/50 business arrangement is where both parties feel perfectly comfortable each doing 60% of the actual needed work indefinitely.
With the right pair, the trust, confidence, and respect for each other is there, regardless of lopsided contributions from time to time (not forever).
If each is always focused on doing more than 50%, actually each FEELING like they are always doing more than 50%, and feeling good about it, even though that would be in excess of their compensation by definition, this eliminates some of the biggest doubts you have suffered from.
Plus on those occasions where more than a nominal 100% needs to be accomplished, you will not only be capable and prepared, but it will not even be a stretch.
As others have said, this emphasizes how carefully you need to align with your partner.
1) You need to trust your cofounder(s) entirely. If you don't have trust, you will have fear, and that will lead to resentment and ultimately a breakdown of the relationship.
Doing work as a technical resource looks very different from doing work as a business resource. Technical challenges have demonstrable progress nearly every day, business challenges take weeks, months, dozens of emails, etc to show progress.
Do not confuse "business" with "easy" or "less time". My job is almost entirely administrative, despite doing coding and design a dozen hours a week. Being an admin is perhaps easier programming all day, but it is not trivial. It takes a special type of person to deal with the business wins and losses, give your cofounder some credit.
2) If you're technical, you will do a lot of the immediately hard work. The business problems, as stated above, are long-tail. They take time to show progress, and you have to be patient. I spend most of my days emailing, making phone calls, creating pipelines, financial modeling, and communicating with my employees (coworkers!) about what I am doing has seemed to satiate their curiosity and demonstrate to them that I am working my ass off to make this a great place to work and a great business.
I think you need to work on communicating with your cofounder(s). They should be able to talk about what they are doing every day, loop you into their progress, and demonstrate their value implicitly.
If you don't trust them though, this will never work.
> And to be clear, I do know how to manage the business aspects too, so it's not like without a business co-founder I would be lost.
I'm curious: why are you wasting time worrying about co-founder issues? In your apparent case, a co-founder is a solution to a problem that you don't have.
If you're truly capable of financing the launch of a business, developing quality commercial software and successfully getting it to market (read: selling), you can keep 100% ownership of your company and call all the shots.
Since that's an ideal scenario, I suspect there's more to the story. For example, many capable entrepreneurs are afraid to start a business on their own, and a co-founder is simply a crutch to address this irrational fear.
That being said I also think that I could benefit from having the right co-founder. I am doing fine financially, but I am still looking to hit a homerun and never need to worry about money again, and to reach this kind of success most people would agree that having a co-founder increases your chances a lot.
Secondly you have a narrow criteria. It's extremely difficult to find people who can continuously work at a high volume. Consistent 60-80 weeks just aren't in the realm of most people. It's not incorrect to want this, or to search for it, just don't expect to find it regularly. Even when you do find someone like that, you may not realize it. Visibility can be a huge impediment. You'll directly see 100% of the things you work on and accomplish. Maybe 10-15% of what your co-founder works on.
And I agree, it's better to have half of a big pie than 100% of a small pie.
Thanks.
Keep in mind, 50% of marriages fail and they have sex, so don't think it is easy or even natural.