If I have one piece of advice for early-stage founders, it is to develop a practice of deep and open sharing early in your co-founder relationship.
Why? Co-founder relationships are complex and you need to build trust when things are going well in order to survive when things go poorly.
To put some data behind this, Noah Wasserman in his classic book, The Founder’s Dilemmas, found that 65% of high potential startups that failed, failed due to co-founder issues.
Here is how you can create a co-founder communication process that will allow you to develop trust early in your co-founder relationship and save you incredible heartache when things get stormier, down the road.
Looking to start a communication practice your co-founder? You can access my free communication template here.
Learn the Non-Violent Communication (NVC) framework. While practicing some form of open sharing is better than practicing none at all—most of us are not skilled at giving and receiving feedback. This is especially true for young, first-time founders, most of whom have not had to navigate gut-wrenching interpersonal issues in the midst of a high stress work environment. For this reason, as a starting point, I recommend learning the Nonviolent Communication framework as a set of tools to that will allow you to push the boundaries of your co-founder conversations without triggering each other and damaging the relationship.
Be consistent. I recommend committing 30-minutes every other week to the explicit purpose of building co-founder rapport. Having coached a large number of founding teams, a common mistake I see is that teams strop doing this during the good periods and then suffer from a lack of trust or rapport when things go poorly. If you stop prioritizing having open conversations with your co-founders, you should ask yourself why? It may be there is a critical conversation you are avoiding that is causing this to slip or simply you think your relationship is so strng it doesn’t need any more work, which is a mindset that will get you in trouble.
Practice “skimming.” Important relationships are like a garden—you need to consistently clear out the weeds to create room for the good stuff to grow. If you stop this process, then the healthy parts won’t get enough sun, and your relationship will become brittle. I call the practice of bringing up small issues, skimming. Skimming keeps your relationship honest and keeps resentment at bay so you have room to tackle the heavy stuff when you need to.
Take risks. Building a strong relaitonship with your co-founders requires taking risks. Whether that is sharing boundaries that are important to you, calling out bad behavior, or being willing to reveal your insecurities, so that you can find solutions to them together. If this is a new partnership, I recommend easing into this process (think about sharing items that feel 10% or 15% in your risk-zone not 80%), but eventually, in order to have a thriving co-founder relationship, you will need to reveal more of yourself than feels comfortable.
Here is a short template I offer to clients looking to develop this kind of practice.