When starting a business, you will have hundreds of decisions to make. Some will be very small – order business cards with rounded corners or square corners? Others will be bigger – do I build my app in PHP or Ruby on Rails? Perhaps the biggest decision of all will be who you surround yourself with during this journey. My advice – find a kick-ass co-founder. It’s what I did and I am so thankful I did.
Let’s knock out the obvious question – why should you give up a significant part of your company to someone else? It’s easy – to be successful, you need to. This is not the time to be greedy. Remember, it’s a lot better to have a smaller stake of a huge success than to have a huge stake in a lackluster or, even worse, failing business. If your idea is at all ambitious, if you have dreams of disrupting an industry, the amount of work will be way too much for one person to successfully manage. As a former investment banker, I mastered doing 20 hours of work in 10. Even still, I can’t imagine starting solo.
Doing work and knocking out to-do lists isn’t the most valuable benefit of a co-founder, though. Heck, if it were just work, you could hire an employee to do this. A co-founder is invaluable because of the drastically different team dynamic that is created. I think there are four characteristics of successful multiple-founder teams:
Comfortable Disagreement – yes, you read this correctly. You and your co-founder must be 100% comfortable sharing thoughts, opinions and shooting down each other’s ideas. Laurence and I question each other’s ideas all the time and I think we are ultimately better for it. When we can openly question each other, I think the ideas become infinitely stronger.
So what makes it work and not an all-out war? There are two things – our incentives are aligned and we assume that we both have good intentions. If we both want what’s best for the business, we’ll ultimately come to a reasonable resolution.
Respect – as is the case in any relationship, both co-founders must respect the opinions and skills of each other. Laurence and I come from somewhat different backgrounds – he spent time in consulting and I was in banking (if you want to know all about the philosophical differences, watch this). While we often see things differently, we are able to make decisions because we respect each other’s opinion and skills. We also recognize that there’s often more than one way to accomplish the same thing.
Support – believe it or not, from time to time, Laurence and I rely on each other for support. Entrepreneurship can, at times, be psychologically and emotionally stressful. Because we’re both encountering the same things, we can help each other. When one loses sight of the big picture – changing the rental real estate market – the other is there to help remind and refocus on the goal.
Fun – how many apps have been started on the premise that things are more fun when done with friends? In this sense, entrepreneurship is no different than going to a bar. I think many multiple-founder teams are able to persevere and stick with their ideas longer for the simple reason that it’s fun to do so. Things that are fun to do, we want to do, and working hard towards a common goal is no different.
The benefits from the multiple-founder dynamic are likely what causes Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator to clearly state, “All you have to do is look at the empirical evidence. Successful single-founder startups are so rare that they're famous on that account.” As a result, Y Combinator almost never accepts single-founder businesses to its #1 ranked accelerator program.
While finding a great co-founder for your business will likely be really tough, it’s critical to do this. You will find the experience of starting out easier, more rewarding and more fun. One last thing for you to remember: your relationship with your co-founder is a lot like a marriage. You want to be comfortable working with this person indefinitely. If you think of it as a short-term thing, the partnership will never work. If you master this relationship, though, you will have more fun and be more successful than you ever could doing it on your own. Good luck!
About Rentalutions: Rentalutions is an online property management platform helping landlords efficiently manage their properties throughout the rental cycle. The business was co-founded by Ryan Coon and Laurence Jankelow. The co-founders became close friends while attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have been friends and started businesses together since. Follow Rentalutions on Twitter at @Rentalutions and Like Rentalutions on Facebook at https://facebook.com/rentalutions.
