Go Find a Co-Founder
Don’t do it alone. Find someone you can clash with, who sees the world differently and doesn’t blindly go along with you.
This is part 2 of a series, you can read Every Business Needs a Founder here.
I heard a fascinating statistic recently: getting married is less of a commitment than co-founding a business.
The average length of marriage in the US is 8.2 years, in the UK the highest chance of divorce happens between the 4th and 8th anniversaries. It’s broadly accepted that growing a successful company can take a decade — overnight success is often years in the making.
In the last post, I talked about the importance of founders, but I wanted to stress how this is not about having to go it alone.
Finding Founders
Finding a co-founder might be the most important thing you can do before getting started on your big idea.
Co-founders might not all be senior members of the team, but ideally you want someone who is shoulder-to-shoulder with you on this big adventure.
On Startup Club, I always kick off with the story of how Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. I ask everyone to close their eyes, and describe the situation he’s working in.
After the obvious answers of “dark” there’s one very consistent element that is identified: he is on his own.
The reality of the situation is completely the opposite, but we are in love with the idea of sole entrepreneurs having to take on everything alone.
Asking for support or help is showing weakness, and founders can’t be weak — this is the narrative that prevails.
I really wish this wasn’t the way we collectively saw the world.
Co-Founder As An Unfair Advantage
Having a co-founder can be a massive advantage if you get it right.
As you scale and grow, a lot of the people around you will be reliant on you to pay their mortgages and feed their kids. It probably doesn’t need saying out loud but this can create a lot of pressure.
Having a co-founder can create an outlet for you to share anxieties or concerns when a contract stalls or product development isn’t going as well as you had hoped. Although candour is important, you just can’t have these conversations with staff members who are still getting hounded by recruiters offering to take them to a better and more secure opportunity.
But a good co-founder should also be able to point out blindspots and things that just aren’t on your radar. When looking for a co-founder you likely need someone who has a completely different skillset and worldview to you, so as to ensure you’re not both egging each other on without keeping things in check.
In these examples I’m talking about co-founding like as if it is always a pair, but that isn’t always the case. Equally, there might be a tighter group of you who are more committed. That can be rewarded or reflected in your shareholdings or contracts. You could have four people in the founding team, but only two of you are the de facto co-founders of the business. There’s a distinction between being a founder in the sense of being there at the start, and being a founder in the sense of founding something.
Investors will often want to see who else you’ve managed to convince to come along with you, it’s a good way to test how convincing and compelling you are and your vision is.
Knowing Your Co-founder
I remember the story from Lean In where Sheryl Sandberg talks about joining Facebook, and how she went for dinner with Mark Zuckerberg every night for a week before committing to join.
You need to know what their thinking is on a range of topics. You will need to predict what their reaction to situations will be, and what they value above all else.
You almost need someone who can read your mind — which isn’t as impossible as it might sound. I might talk more about this in a future post.
Perhaps crucially, you need to know what their limits are. I remember hearing a story about a pair of co-founders who only found out when they reached their first bump in the road that one was willing to remortgage their house and the other was already looking for a new job.
I think often we look for the good in situations and that’s an important survival technique and coping mechanism, but with your co-founder you need to know their downsides in advance so that you can be prepared. Nobody is perfect and that’s fine, don’t expect your co-founder to be — you’re not. You need to share your weaknesses with them and not be scared of judgement.
If you can get the balance right then you can become an incredibly powerful team. I’ve been very fortunate in my time with Welsh ICE and TownSq to have met Mandy who perfectly compliments my skillset. It gives us closer to a 360° view on what’s really going on, and operationally gives us the capacity to know who needs to do which meetings and be involved at different stages of projects.
I’ll talk more about the importance of gossip in a future post, but this 360° view can help you to see things within your organisation or a situation that you wouldn’t notice if you stared at it for a month.
There are other co-founders then who can play a role in different ways, but this post is really about finding someone who is operationally alongside you, carrying the business equally and supportively.
That’s the hardest thing about meeting and connecting with a co-founder, as with the divorce example at the start. You need to find someone who is very aligned, but very different. You need the gallows humour in the tough times, and the openness and candour to call each other out without falling out.
And given all you’re asking of from your co-founder, you need to remember to be an equally good co-founder yourself.
Of course, there are plenty of founders who have been successful without co-founders, but very rarely without a significant and often invisible support team by their side in other ways.
Beyond the co-founders, then comes the team. That’s a wider topic for future posts.
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