i've been working on a startup for the past 24 months with my cofounder - i'm technical and she's mostly focused on business side (with basic frontend skills). we got funded roughly 18 months ago for an idea i came up with, was excited about, and found some traction.
since then we pivoted away from it. we've roughly pivoted almost every month to something new. there is no longer any vision or clear problem we're trying to solve. each month is our team simply fishing for ideas in different industries and domains hoping to strike gold.
my cofounder and i don't see eye to eye on most things anymore and the relationship has also deteriorated significantly. my cofounder and i disagree upon what problems to focus on. for her, ideas only resonate if there are competitors who've raised $X million or hit certain revenue targets with no regard for interest or insights for a problem/industry. i'd much rather work on problems where i have some inherent interest and/or urge to solve the problem but it's hard to drive a shared vision between us both. this is a constant point of friction.
after 24 months of working together, i'm now considering quitting my own startup to either go do another one or take a job where i can find problems and a future cofounder. has anyone been through anything similar in the past? how did you navigate this?
1. At this early stage of the business, the core asset is really the co-founding team and their relationship. Conflict is very much normal, but how you resolve it is important. You should be able to articulate your co-founder's concerns. For ex. she might feel the pressure to show "progress" to your investors.
2. It takes a lot of time and energy to build a good working relationship. Moving onto something else might seem like a good idea at the moment, but you could be right back with the same issue with another co-founder.
3. If you do decide to move on, end the relationship as amicably as you can. Note that this is not necessarily the "quickest" route, but it'll help keep your reputation intact.
Edit: spelling.
- Building a company is really emotional, as you already know. Most founders are under-skilled when they start, and are forced to learn quickly. As a result, you get a lot of scars along the way and the experience will test all of your insecurities. Learning how to resolve existential crises again and again is part of the package. And it gets worse. Wait until you have whole teams of smart opinionated people that you have to lead.
- It'll be good to revisit why you and your co-founder decided to start a company. You've both spent 2 years of your lives living in the trenches, so to speak. Someone decided you two were worth the risk. Why didn't your co-founder quit after the first idea failed? Why does she keep trying? I obviously don't have enough info to make any judgement calls, but I've seen situations where people make the wrong call because they've failed to truly appreciate the emotional baggage. For example, sometimes the first failure hits really hard and triggers all sorts of insecurities in a co-founder about not being good enough. And if their team starts questioning their judgement over and over without diffusing the insecurities, it just makes things worse.
- There are good and bad breakups. Good breakups are worth it for the emotional closure and the reputational upside. Bad breakups can create all sorts of fallout that will affect you in unexpected way (sometimes without you even knowing, ex. if the drama resurfaces during due-diligence). All the legal mechanics are also much smoother and drama-free when the breakup is on good terms.
- I am probably biased because these types of co-founder blowups are what keep investors up at night. Losing a technical co-founder is not only emotionally draining, but usually lethal for the investment. People problems are gnarly and take a lot of skill and precision to diffuse. If anything, use the crisis as a personal challenge to figure out how to resolve it on good terms.
what does a good cofounder breakup look like?
If your business model is raising money from VCs then doing things VCs want is important to getting paid.
All businesses tailor their output to suit their customer. Your customer is VCs. So you need to tailor your output accordingly.
In this sense your business partner is not wrong. There's no point on working on things that excite you, if it doesn't excite them. That's a hobby.
Sure, pivoting too often is also wrong. So you should try to improve that.
At this point it's probably worth sitting down with your partner with the fundamental understanding she is right; You need to find something to attract the next investor. However you need to stick with it, success or fail. You've thrown a lot against the wall, now it's time to choose.
Of course you'll likely fail. Most businesses do. VC based businesses at an even higher rate because your customer base is so small. But even failure is OK because VCs are looking for founders, not successes.
Make no mistake; founding a startup is hard work. Not fun stuff. Not interesting stuff. Mostly it's just work.
Being a founder isn't about coding. It's about business. You need to bring more to the table than just coding. Just like your co-founder takes an interest in the technical side, so you need to take more than a passing interest in the business side.
In any business, sales is the most important thing. Without them you will fail. Tech supports sales, not the other way around.
I'm sorry that this sounds harsh. I don't mean it that way. I wish you success. That success starts with you realizing the truth at the heart of your partners position. Start there. Fix your relationship.
Good luck!
It's not clear to me what you're preserving by staying.
But right now you're just wasting your life. The most valuable resource you burn through at a startup is your life. Startups are stressful, they wear you down, they're not great for your finances, and many of those are doubly so if you don't get along with your cofounder.
Just quit, you don't owe anyone your life. You are less likely to find traction with two cofounders with a bad working relationship, and if you do find traction you are less likely to be able capitalize on it.
Also? Working your ass off to save a shitty business relationship has a psychic cost. You do not have an unlimited reservoir of relationship energy to spend. If you want to keep doing startups, you need to guard your morale reserves. Wringing yourself out here won't just mess up your current startup (which seems fucked enough already); it can mess up your next one too.
That kind of thinking lacks vision and makes it really hard to build anything meaningful. Over time, it wears you down. Even if the product “works,” it doesn’t feel good because you know you're forcing it. These folks tend to say things like “this should be easy,” then only show up to question why something isn’t done. They manufacture urgency instead of clarity, and when things inevitably fall short, the blame falls on the technical team.
Second, you’re not a first-time founder anymore. Life’s short. For me at least, you’ve earned the right to walk away and build something you actually care about again.
I ask this because I have on several occasions lawyered up (sometimes adversarially, sometimes just to keep my own ducks in a row) during separations and (if you're working with someone serious who is qualified to manage a founder separation) it's always expensive, but not always valuable.
I also ask this because this is the Nth "I'm splitting up from my startup" I've participated in, and I've noticed that for better or worse, this community has a bias towards dramatically satisfying resolutions, like ensuring for instance that each founder in a doomed startup receives precisely the allocation of company assets that they're entitled to. In the real world, the smart play is often just to walk away.
I've seen almost 10 breakups from startup friends in the last year and have been through one myself. It's like dating — very few end up in marriage and most marriages end up in divorce. Except maybe worse, because people get married after knowing each other for just a few days, in order to apply to YC.
On one hand, if the leaving co-founder retains all equity, it creates a sandbagging situation on a cap table that's no longer useful to the business. On the other hand, it feels right for the leaving co-founder to enjoy some upside for the years they put in.
Decisions like these are tough to make in the moment, but looking back you almost never regret it. Trust your gut.
There's one easy part of your situation, which is that your immediate next step is clear. I think it's clear because it sounds like the two of you have a fundamental disagreement about how to choose a direction. There's also a power imbalance if you've consistently been going along with pivots that you don't want to execute on. If you think you can resolve things, then maybe I'm wrong. I'm basing my advice on the fact that this is 24 months in — enough time for you to know how easy it'd be to get back to "we like working together and are on a path to success."
Now for the hard parts: * You want to act as professionally as possible in walking away. Communicate clearly, being fair to both yourself and the other people involved. I think it's easy to err to far on either side (either too defensive/passive "nice to yourself" or too deferential "nice to others"). * It can be tempting to think of this is as your cofounder's fault, but that's not constructive, and it's better to learn toward your future actions. For example, how could you have seen this problem earlier? My guess is that you were never "cofounder compatible," and this is a chance to get better at identifying that compatibility with others (useful for both startups and other jobs).
It's not a fun situation, and I hope things go well for you.
I've parted ways with cofounders in two of my five startups (they left, not me... I could afford a zero paycheck for a little while, they couldn't). In both cases we did better after the split. In both cases our original business idea didn't work out, and we were trying to stay alive. It felt like pivoting from idea to idea. Reality was it was just trying to sell and collect enough to make payroll in six weeks. So we went from whatever we were doing to custom dev shop... Survival mode sucks.
When got down to a single founder, it wasn't that one person was right or wrong about what the business could do. It was that the business could execute well enough (without cofounders fighting and second guessing) so it could survive, and eventually find something to productize.