A year ago, I had a vision, a plan, and a co-founder. The last part is the trickiest part for startups.
In all the years I have been in the startup ecosystem and wherever my travels have taken me, it is rare to see founding teams remain intact past the first year. Every year after, the odds get decidedly worse for co-founders to remain with the startup.
It amazes me that my first startup co-founding team remained intact till the end. The dynamic among us had grown toxic as the struggles and setbacks mounted. Even when things improved, the combination of clashing personalities, competing interests, and growing distrust was too great a divide for us to align on anything.
Even with the bad taste from that experience, my intention when I launched TribeROI was always to have a co-founder. I felt it was important to have someone that I could build with, especially given the scope of what I was trying to accomplish to build a category around community business metrics that does not exist yet.
The other reason though was that this is one of those expectations in the startup ecosystem. Investors shy away from solo founders. Customers, especially larger companies, get concerned about one-person teams. Your startup does not even seem real in the eyes of others if you are by yourself.
I was struggling to find someone to join me. For a few months, I would reach out to people, exchange a few messages, meet for coffee, and then the communications would fizzle out. That was fine though because it was not meant to be because of the vibe or the interest in community or different expectations.
Then I got an email out of the blue from someone that read my book Community-in-a-Box and found me in one of the online message groups we were both in. She had good energy, enthusiasm, warmth, and was easy to talk to. She had community experience, had a math background, could code, and had even built out an idea for the product as a demo.
The motivation was there, but the real test was whether we could work well together under pressure. We joined a Kaggle BigQuery hackathon to mold her basic demo into a real MVP that could prove out the concept. After a month of working on and refining the submission, we had a working, if somewhat janky, version of what we had envisioned at the start.
We built a fairly decent product leveraging a lot of tooling neither of us had much experience with like BigQuery AI, ADK for agent orchestration, Vertex, and Firebase. We worked distributed across time zones, which often changed as I was on the road speaking at events. We had a good cadence and understood each other’s lane where I handled building the front-end and she worked on the back-end.
While we did not win the hackathon, what I had gained was confidence and trust in someone that I could see as my co-founder. When she agreed to come onboard last October, we got to work to build the real product and the actual company. I thought we were on our way and nothing could stop us.
Then eight months later, I decided it was time for a new direction and part ways. I said goodbye and became a solo founder.
A lot changed over that time. Coding agents got much better. AI in general became more useful and more reliable. Because of AI, things that would take days or weeks to do, took hours or even minutes.
There is a new narrative about co-founders and I believe it is growing. You don’t need a co-founder now. The best reason to get co-founders before was you could go faster with more people. This made sense because you split the workload. The more co-founders you had, the more work you split off.
Today, you can 10x your output just by handing your workload to agents. I have never experienced the level of productivity and output as I have experienced in the past four months since I went solo. I rebuilt the product using a custom engineering harness I created that let me launch the 3rd iteration of the beta. I have extensive market reports and a complete end-to-end GTM strategy. I built my own CRM system to manage leads and sales opportunities. All the backend company operations are handled by agents.
I still believe there is value in having co-founders. That value however is not in your ability to work faster. In some ways, you go slower because you have to communicate, explain, and align with each other. There is a coordination tax you pay the more people you bring on. The real value is in the creativity, hustle, emotional support, intuition, and checks on decision making that is still wholly in the realm of humans.
Maybe you are at the part of your startup journey considering co-founders. The equation is different now given the capabilities that AI endows us with. As you seek others to join you on building the vision, here are some thoughts on how best to make that relationship work:
Spending time aligning the values and culture with your co-founders is important, but aligning on product vision and shipping velocity is just as important, especially since the speed that you can experiment and ship has significantly increased.
Beware of the trap of confusing a pleasant working relationship with an effective one. Every co-founder needs to be results-driven and accountable, and on a small team, those checks should happen regularly in order to stay on track.
Founders put in sweat equity for their equity and go all-in to build the startup. If someone you are considering as a co-founder is asking for a salary, they do not understand what it means to be a founder. The vast majority of people just want a pay check, stable hours, and certainty.
Do not depend upon co-founders to fill the void of loneliness and anxiety. They can help, but you also need an outlet outside of the work to let off steam and to talk things out. Tap into your network beyond the startup and founder communities to lean on for support and advice.
Compatibility on values is necessary, but compatibility on experience is even more important. When there is a vast divide in experience level, it creates a power dynamic where co-founders begin to distrust each other
When a co-founder is not working out, you need to course correct quickly. Ignoring early warning signs does not lead to better results later on. Things never just “work themselves out”. All it does is delay the inevitable and wastes precious time.
There must be an ultimate decision maker. That is the role of the CEO. This is because deadlocks and decision paralysis happen even with the best of co-founder relationships. Not doing so can slow down momentum or even stall progress.
Avoid working with someone that does not have the same energy level as you. The pace of startups is quick. There will be severe lack of sleep. The pressure is constant. If someone cannot handle that intensity and speed, it will create resentment among the co-founders.
Once you decide on a co-founder, get the founder agreement settled ASAP. Be prepared for some push back, disagreement, and emotional exchanges. That is expected and makes for a stronger partnership. If discussions drag on past a couple of weeks though, it’s a sign that it is not meant to be.
Looking at this list, bringing on a co-founder can feel daunting. It often takes months. You will meet a lot of duds. So many people flake out or hedge. It sort of feels like dating, but you feel worse about yourself because the time wasted means delaying your startup dreams.
That being said, I do believe that having co-founders still makes sense for many entrepreneurs. When you gel, it is an awesome feeling and having others go through the ups and downs makes the experience feel more fulfilling. While AI can do a lot, there is still nothing stronger or more impactful than the human connection.
So will I bring on a co-founder again? At this stage, most likely no. I would consider bringing on founding team members for more equity and more say on the direction of TribeROI. At the same time, now with the product launched and initial design partners talks ongoing, I do see value in having one ot two others onboard to help guide this journey.
If you have a startup now, are you with co-founders or are you going solo? What are the pros and cons that you are experiencing?
Mark