Jan Gasiewski
25 Jun 2024
I was hoping to share a short insight on how I manage my co-founder relationship but I’ve ended up writing a longer post - hope it will help anyone searching for a co-founder!
I salute anyone who is a solo founder - fitting all the qualities required to achieve entrepreneurial success in one person is a rare occurrence.
Finding a co-founder is not an easy task as well, and more often than I wish I’ve seen conflicts between founders destroy even the most prosperous business. I even heard about founders attending couples counselling sessions together.
I also speak with a lot of people struggling to find the right cofounder, especially the technical one. Unfortunately, similarly to dating, there are no easy solutions to finding that one person right for you - meeting people, building relationships, and putting yourself out there are the only ways to increase the chance for success.
Needless to say, you need to find someone that compliments your skills and personality. If you’re an introvert like me, find a relationship-builder. If you’re an extrovert, find an excel-freak who will help organize the chaos. Search for qualities such as resilience, genuineness, adaptability, and accountability. It may be exciting at the beginning of the journey, but the real and inevitable test will come when the times get hard. During hard times, you truly test a co-founder.
Nevertheless, once you find that one work ‘wife’ or ‘husband’, life gets much easier, but only if you build the right foundation for the strange mixture of personal and professional relationship that you’ll have with the cofounder.
I was very lucky with Ali Youssef and the relationship we have has been foundational to everything we have done so far. There are a few key rules that have been working for us for the past 5 years:
A) We go into all businesses together
Resentment between founders often begins when one person engages in a side hustle or another business, losing focus and putting less effort into the joint cause.
B) We split (almost) everything 50/50
Similar to the above, conflict could be sparked if your relationship is not in a perfect equilibrium. We share everything equally: equity, salary; and companies; and we always give 100% to all our ventures.
C) Radical Transparency and Communication
We have made thousands of decisions together, and not once have we been in a deadlock. We owe it to radical transparency and an ability to compromise - we communicate everything to avoid small misunderstandings spiralling into wider conflicts.
Those are not “unspoken” rules - it is a founders’ agreement that we have with Ali that is at the centre of everything we do. Those are the conversations you need to have before you embark on a startup journey.
I hope this will help some to find the right co-founder and achieve great things!
And big thanks to UCL and UCL School of Management for creating an environment that connected me with Ali!
