Thank you to Muhammad Baig for creating these notes. To contribute to the TWiST PodNotes archive email us.
Episode Date: April 24, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og_Hjw5rtnM
In the early phases of your startup, do you need a co-founder? Who's the right person and what kind of prior relationship should you have? Is it helpful for fundraising? And if you're not a technical person, how do you convince a coding ninja to get on board?
Top Insights
- Keep your communications transparent.
- Take the co-founder relationship dead serious and invest in it, if that’s the path you take.
- Needing a co-founder to succeed is a myth. It may be more optimal to recruit a founding team.
- Enjoy the journey. Go on lunches, take trips - if possible. Take time to bond with your team, especially with your co-founder(s).
- People feel that success could be greater with a co-founder since you have two people hugely invested to make it succeed. They believe that two people working on something together, for free, will get twice as much work done.
- People believe in this myth because they’ve seen so many examples of successful companies with co-founders.
- It can be lonely to be a startup founder, so it helps to have someone who will share the negative experiences with you and have honest cofounder discussions with.
- Employees tend to tell you only the good news because they don’t want to go to their boss with bad news.
- When the company is having issues (unknown to the team), a founder usually won't talk to the team about it, because it could make them panic and/or plan their exit. However, you can **talk to a co-founder in these situations.
- Co-founders need to have a complimentary skill set.