36 - Co-Founder Mini-Series - What Makes A Great Co-Founder
Welcome back to the Co-Founder mini-series. Since writing the last post in the series we’ve publicised that Griff is the Co-Founder of Mayday. He’s the person I’ve long dreamed of starting a business with. I’m someone who seldom gives himself 10/10. This is a rare exception. This mini-series shares my Co-Founding story and learnings.
The first post in the series covered what a startup Co-Founder is, with my definition of:
“Someone who shares the ultimate responsibility for first navigating the startup to a sustainable business”
The last post was about why I wanted to work with one in building Mayday: the protection it provides against getting stuck, the infinite potential upside from shaping ideas together and the “you only live once” enjoyment factor. The caveat underpinning this being that these benefits would only flow from having a great Co-Founder. That is the focus of this post: What makes a great Co-Founder?
There are two constituent parts to Co-Founder greatness: what they can do (and enable you to do) and who they are.
What They Can Do (and enable you to do)
This starts with a pragmatic assessment of what the business needs. What are the different functional activities that it will need to carry out? For Mayday, being a software as a service (SaaS) business, these are:
Product Management - translating target user needs into features and designs
Software Engineering - building and securely maintaining our software product
Marketing - building a brand and generating demand
Partnerships - building and maintaining partnerships that can generate short and long term revenue
Sales - converting that demand into customers
Customer Support, Success & Account Management - retaining and growing customers
Operations - including People, Recruitment and Legal
Finance & Accounting
As it grows, the business will be able to hire experienced senior management to run these functions. At the start, resources are scarce. The business can bring in contractors to provide additional expertise and hire junior team members to provide additional implementation capacity. But the Co-Founders need to own responsibility for these functional areas.
This is about good enough. It’s not going to be possible to have the expertise within the Co-Founding team to be great at leading all of the different functional areas. You could theoretically assemble a vast Co-Founding team with deep expertise across all of your functional areas. But that would be to the detriment of effective decision making ability as Co-Founders, as well as everyone having motivatingly big enough equity stakes. What you need as Co-Founders is the ability to move forward in each of the functional areas such that none presents an Achilles Heel to you as a business.
The core requirement of a great Co-Founder then, is that they enable you as a Founding team to complete the jigsaw of good-enough across all of your functional areas. This necessitates self-awareness. What are your strengths and weaknesses? A weakness is only an enduring weakness if you hide from its existence. When acknowledged, it can be compensated for in your Co-Founder(s). The opportunity on top of that requirement is the extent to which your skills enable each of you as Co-Founders to focus on things you are excited about doing. That is how you best exceed the sum of your individual parts. It being impossible to be great at anything you are not excited about.
I’ll revisit the functional areas of Mayday with how Griff and I approach them in a subsequent post.
Who They Are
This is about Four C’s:
1 - Capability
And the standards that they bring to their work. Are you aligned on where that bar is and should be? You want someone who stretches you. Who pushes the boundary of your best work. Whose perspective changes how you think. I love Brian Chesky’s description here, that you want Co-Founders so good they scare you at how much they’re going to make you raise your game. As well as Paul Graham’s heuristic of whether you could imagine yourself describing them as an animal. An animal being:
“someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive”
2 - Conflict
Most importantly that you do have conflict. As William Wrigley said: “When two people in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary”. In the Founders’ Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman cites the term Eizer K’negdo, a Hebrew phrase for when God was creating Eve as a partner for Adam, meaning “a helper against him”. You need someone who will call you out, challenge you, hold you accountable and be a helper against you. At the same time, you need the ability to disagree and commit. A mechanism for moving forward effectively in those inevitable moments where you won’t be able to reach consensus.
3 - Ceiling
You want someone with potentially infinite upside. Who can continue to scale as the business does. An outranked Co-Founder in their domain would be messy.
4 - Culture
That your values align. Mission, vision, strategy, anything in running a business, can change. Personal values seldom do. Everything else is a second and subsequent order creation of those values. It’s critical to ensure they are aligned. For me this is first and foremost about humility as the parent of all other values. Startups are learning journeys. And it’s impossible to learn what you think you already know.
That’s what makes a great Co-Founder for me. The next post in this Co-Founder series details how I went about finding one and the process that culminated in Griff becoming the Co-Founder of Mayday. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!