My best co-founder is someone who I would almost certainly spend little or no time with outside of work. Our personalities are polar opposites. Together we've bootstrapped a $2.5M ARR business in 16 months.
Some thoughts:
- Cofounders are high stress and high time relationships. You want to find someone who doesn't burn everything down every time they get stressed. Finding someone who deals with stress in a healthy way is huge.
- Don't let the small things get in the way of the big things. You have to have tolerance for each other's mistakes. This was a huge problem for me and a previous cofounder. The way I handle it now with my cofounder is we set a price on mistakes. If you want to take a $1,000 risk, we don't even discuss it. A $10,000, we talk about.
- I generally prefer people driven by discipline than passion. Passion cracks under pressure. Discipline keeps working.
- Ego. Find someone who doesn't think they're god. I know in the SV hype messiah driven world of startups everyone tries to be the prophet. Avoid these people. For me, someone who has confidence but not arrogance is huge.
All good tips and ones I've learned over time as well. Particularly like the "set a price on mistakes" part. I think communicating there is a healthy amount of mistake-tolerance does wonders for long-term personal and professional growth.
Just for curiosity, how do you think you and your co-founder would proceed if there was misjudgement about a $1,000 risk that turned into a $10,000 one?
Of course, we'd talk about it. If a mistake blows up we have to talk about it.
The point I'm trying to get across is that you have to be willing to let your partners make mistakes. Also, you have to trust that your partner is going to learn from their mistakes. I like adding a dollar amount to it because it gets you in the right mindset of focusing on important things. I think as a cofounder, it's your job to step in if you think someone's going to take the company over a cliff. Otherwise, give each other room to grow. Everyone in an early company is required to learn aka make mistakes until you stop making those mistakes.
A person who is confident speaks authoritatively and, when asks, backs up their statements with evidence.
A person who is arrogant speaks authoritatively but tries to weasel out of justifying their statements by using logical fallacies, deflecting attention to others or other matters, or bullshitting.
There's also a general attitude component that seems pretty common. A confident person doesn't need to put their ego on display for everyone, because they believe their positions have a firm foundation in data or fact to stand on. An arrogant person will tend to engage in a lot of bluster and undeserved self-promotion to distract from the lack of quality of their ideas.
Both confident and arrogant people can be right and wrong at various times. I'd like to believe the confident person is generally more right than the arrogant person, but that isn't necessarily the case. Having worked for and with both types of people, I would rather work for someone confident, even if there was an arrogant person who was right more often. The stress and disgust that comes with working with arrogant people just isn't worth it to me.
Confidence and arrogance of two sides of the same coin, they're not mutually exclusive and people can be varying degrees of both. The biggest difference is always in the eye of the beholder.
Hard disagree. I think of Bob Sutton's quote a lot (I don't think its his quote, he just use it a lot as well) : Speak as if you were certainly right, listen as if you were certainly wrong.
You need confidence to assume your choices, sell your ideas, and take risks. You need to avoid arrogance to avoid mistakes, learn, and build a healthy team
It's hard to describe but easy to observe the difference. I'd put it like confidence is believing you're correct and arrogance is believing no one else could be right.
> someone who I would almost certainly spend little or no time with outside of work
That might be your experience, but the best cofounder for me is one I can share everything with. At work or outside, we're always in sync. I don't know how you would pull through difficult moments with an ice wall in the middle. Being able to see the worst of each other is how you really know somebody.
> Finding someone who deals with stress in a healthy way is huge.
For me, I like the separation. I really appreciate being able to have a bad day at work but a good day at home. When you're starting a company, it will consume your life. It will also alternate from thinking you're on top of the world to feeling worthless.
When you're starting a company with someone, you're going to spend tons of time together and share personal things anyways. In some ways, I think it's hedging the emotions and keeping things about the business. I think you can work with someone and become friends. I've failed and seen others fail trying to turn a friendship into a business.
Yeah totally agree on the reverse direction. It is very rare to have a friendship that also becomes a business relationship, at least with my network. You just become friends for very different reasons.
She was friends with another cofounder. The other cofounder left the company, leaving us two. I got incredibly lucky to have a cofounder to turn out to be the person she is. Things could've easily gone very differently.
The advice I've heard is that you want someone you previously worked with.
Some thoughts:
- Cofounders are high stress and high time relationships. You want to find someone who doesn't burn everything down every time they get stressed. Finding someone who deals with stress in a healthy way is huge.
- Don't let the small things get in the way of the big things. You have to have tolerance for each other's mistakes. This was a huge problem for me and a previous cofounder. The way I handle it now with my cofounder is we set a price on mistakes. If you want to take a $1,000 risk, we don't even discuss it. A $10,000, we talk about.
- I generally prefer people driven by discipline than passion. Passion cracks under pressure. Discipline keeps working.
- Ego. Find someone who doesn't think they're god. I know in the SV hype messiah driven world of startups everyone tries to be the prophet. Avoid these people. For me, someone who has confidence but not arrogance is huge.