How to find the right co-founder

I love being surprised when I am sure I know exactly the outcome – and then find out that I am absolutely wrong.

In the past, I have mentioned that I do some coaching. I decided to eat my own cooking, and I signed up for a free 45-minute coaching session with a very successful organization that specializes in C-level coaching.  

I was sure that this was going to be a goof and a waste of time. Wrong. The guy was terrific. He probed, and I participated. The outcome was that the session reinforced my absolute belief in the value of a mentor, but not for myself (I am past the pale), but instead for one of the key executives on my team, who is being groomed to become the CEO early next year.

The entrepreneurial lesson here has been told 1,000 times. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that will kill you. Finding the right coach is critical. And it can’t be the guy in the corner office.

That leads to the first puzzle our budding entrepreneur might face – finding the right co-founder. I have done more than a dozen deals in a variety of categories – and without fail, I have always had a co-founder. 

Mostly I have been quite fortunate, a couple of times I have had my head handed to me.  

Let’s get an expert opinion from Harvard Business School lecturer Julia Austin, author of “How to Identify the Perfect Cofounder.”  She says, “Many investors favor startups with multiple founders.” 

Actually, the jury is still out on this one, because a famous study by another then-Harvard professor Noam Wasserman points out that “conflict within the founding team is one of the primary reasons high-potential startups fail.” They can’t get along.  

(“You cannot be serious,” John McEnroe at Wimbledon.)

The classic venture capital model is to get an MBA to be the CEO and a genius tech co-founder to be the CTO. It might be classic, but approximately 50% of first marriages end in divorce, notwithstanding that thing about until death do us part.

The startup world is littered with these tales. All with different reasons, but always with the same outcome. The co-founder hunt is hard. You can’t just go on “Coffee Meets Bagel” and swipe left or right.  

I do not have the easy answer, but I know that the dance takes time. The founder needs to carefully probe what he/she really needs – or more accurately is missing.   

It is not only wanting someone to share the burden of building a company, but truly understanding what skill set that you don’t have that is a must-have. If you are going on a 500-mile canoe trip, finding a partner who likes to paddle makes perfect sense. It is probably also a good idea to decide who is going to sit in front or in back.  

However, it is actually more critical to find someone with domain expertise, someone who has made the trip before and knows where the campsites are and which islands have the bears.

I can teach you to paddle, but experience and expertise are actually the more valuable feature. We all know that experience is an expensive teacher.

After domain expertise, if I can get a good chunk of “shared values,” then the partnership begins to make more sense. That values thing is critical and takes time to reveal itself.

A hundred years ago, I was thinking of getting married. My mother suggested that I first take Betty on a camping trip where I was sure it was going to rain and cut a hole in the tent in advance. And see what happens.

A “wantrepreneur” has an overly optimistic view of the adventure, assuming someone else will build the fire in the rain. Your co-founder needs to delight in getting their hands dirty, “the muck and mire of the startup life.”

Finally, consider a pre-nup. In a marriage, the big four are sex, money, religion and children.   

In a co-founder startup, there are myriad — voting rights, intellectual property ownership, equity, vesting, salary, title, money, authority, etc. It is a backyard laced with punji sticks.

That comes back to shared values. Stuff will happen along the way, and no algorithm can build the fire. If you get it right, well then magic happens with toasted marshmallows.

Rule No. 791: 51% of nothing is still nothing.

Senturia is a serial entrepreneur who invests in startups. Please email ideas to neil@askturing.ai.