How To Prevent Founder Fallouts

Why choosing a cofounder is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make 🧵

Many early-stage startups fail due to founder disputes - founders spend so much time together that the relationship they form is second only to marriage and family.

After all, your cofounder will be involved in some of the most important decisions of your career.

They'll be the person you turn to when a challenge comes up and you need to find a way forward 📉

And they'll be the first person to know when you get a big win 📈

So how difficult is it to choose the right cofounder?

The answer is... pretty difficult 🤷‍♂️

This is because a cofounder needs to have specific characteristics to complement yours as a startup founder.

The things I have found to be most important in a cofounder are:

✅ A complementary personality.

The point is to find someone who will fill in the gaps around your personality strengths and make you more effective as a leader.

✅ Different operational skills from yours.

If you're a business maverick, then try and find someone that's better at the technology side of things.

✅Someone with similar level of determination to yours.

You want someone that will be your equal partner and put in as much work as you do to make your startup successful.

✅ Someone you know or have worked with before.

A long-time colleague or someone else you can trust and comfortably work with, even when there is conflict.

✅ Honesty.

Your cofounder needs to be someone you are completely open with, especially if you are bootstrapping everything yourselves.

✅ A singular vision.

You both need to be on the same page when it comes to your venture - who you're hiring, what you'll be spending money on.

Take my cofounder at NineTwoThee Venture Studio, Pavel Kirillov for example 🤝

For 10 years, Pavel and I have built NineTwoThree  and we spent many nights deciding between growth and sustainability.

Pavel and I built our first #app to 600,000 downloads and we collectively didn't know how to code apps, create websites, market, sell, or build a startup.

We learned on the job 💻

After 2 years of learning application building, in 2016 Pavel and I were asked to build a #mobileapp for a company without yet having a mobile team.

We had self-taught ourselves design and code, and a company worth $2B dollars thought we could solve their app problem.

And we did it.

Why?

Because someone believed we could.

More on the how here.

Now we are a global team of nearly fifty, and we've built 45 products and 9 startups to date.

And I know it's all thanks to my cofounder and myself working together through all the ups and downs.

TL:DR Find yourself a cofounder that will push you to achieve more, fill in the gaps and share your vision then fallouts won't happen.