Few people are going to have more of an impact on your business than your co-founders. Here’s an overview of where you can find them and how to test if you’re a good fit for each other.
Video Transcript
Hey! Among all the questions that you have to answer when you’re starting a startup, choosing your team is among the most important by far. And inside those decisions, choosing your co-founder is even more important than anything else. Because in the beginning, it’s literally you and your co-founders take control and take care of everything. In the next three episodes, including this one, I want to answer the most frequent questions that I get about co-founders.
Number one: how do you meet your Co-founder? And how do you make sure you guys get along well? Second: how do you split your company shares among your Co-founders? And then third: last, but definitely not least, what do you do if things go wrong? And to make it a bit more interesting, I’m going to try and answer all three questions on my way down to the lake, which is a walk that I take almost daily. So, question number one: how do you meet your co-founders? And how do you make sure it’s a good fit? Well, there’s no good answer to the first part of the question. You could meet your co-founders anywhere. The important piece is that you find someone that shares your passion.
That could be at university, it could be at your previous job, but it could also be at a startup event where you proactively look for someone that shares the same interest. I think what’s more important than finding people is making sure that you really get along well. Because after all, being Co-founders is not something that you can change easily. And most likely, you’re going to be in this together, not just for a year or two, but more likely for a decade. So when it comes to figuring out if you are a good fit for each other, things that I’ve seen, do well is if you plan challenges together if you push yourself to the limit a bit. And one way to do this will be to go on a team retreat. Recently with Tomahawk.VC we went on a retreat, and to make things a little more interesting, we fasted for three days. This was not known to Massimo and Claude who joined me on that retreat. And that definitely led to some interesting situations.
If you want to see more about that, go over here and click to see our two-part video on the recent retreat that we did. All right. So before we’re going to switch to the other two questions, to quickly summarize: doesn’t really matter where are you going to find your Co-founders. Speak up, mention your idea to a lot of people and I’m sure you’ll find someone with similar interests. Second, don’t rush into the relationship. It’s extremely important that you and your. Co-founders are a good fit not just for this year or this month, but for the next decade, ideally. And with that, have a beautiful day.
Stay curious and I will talk to you soon!
