Here’s Why You Should Appreciate Your Co-Founders More Than You Probably Do
When was the last time you told your co-founders how much you love them, and why has it been so long?
A founder scheduled an “urgent” meeting with me. According to his email, his startup had run into a catastrophic problem that was going to surely cause him to shut it down.
I was less convinced. However, I’d been talking with the founder for three years about his various projects, and I thought he had long term potential as an entrepreneur. Plus, he offered to buy me a milkshake, and how could I refuse that?
We met a couple days later, and I was surprised he was alone. “Where’s Ryan?” I asked. Ryan was his longtime co-founder, and I’d always met them together.
He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Ryan and I aren’t working together on this project anymore,” he said. Then he quickly added, “but that’s totally OK. I’ve been solo-foundering it for the past six months, and things have been going great.”
“Not too great, it sounds like,” I responded, alluding to the urgency of his email and our meeting.
“Well, yeah,” he replied sheepishly. “But there issue I need help with isn’t something a co-founder could fix. It’s a technology issue. A really big one, too, and Ryan wouldn’t have been able to fix it either because it has nothing to do with us or anything in our control.”
Even though I hadn’t heard the issue, I immediately knew the problem and how to fix it because I’d seen the same thing happen the night before, and it caused me to lose my mother-in-law’s dog.
The dog and the open gate
I have a fenced-in backyard. I open my back door, my dog runs out, does his business, and then runs back in. Aside from occasional cleanup duty (doody?), it’s a wonderful luxury and makes the dog owning experience significantly better… especially when it’s raining.
My mother-in-law has a dog, too. But she doesn’t have a fenced in yard, so she always walks her dog on a leash. However, my mother-in-law was traveling that same week I was meeting the entrepreneur of this story for milkshakes, and, the night before my meeting, she’d brought her dog to our house so we could watch it. Before bedtime that evening, I opened the door to let the two animals out.
My dog lazily trotted down the stairs of my back deck and started sniffing his favorite tree. My mother-in-law’s dog took some more convincing. However, after a gentle nudge, the fluffy, yappy, -oodle mix followed my dog down the stairs. It surveyed the yard for a few seconds and then, without warning, began bolting toward the open gate, up the driveway, and onto the road.
“Shit!” I yelled, and I sprinted down the stairs after her. As I chased that fuzzy, yappy, nightmare, I found myself thinking about the open gate. Our neighbor’s son mows our lawn every couple of weeks, and he must have left the gate open. “Didn’t he remember we have a dog?” I muttered as I ran. “How could he be so careless?”
Then I thought more and realized our neighbor hadn’t been around for a few days. Mind you, I was still fairly sure he was the one who’d left the gate open, but, as I desperately chased my mother-in-law’s fluffy-doodle around my neighborhood at midnight in my bathrobe, I also found myself wondering how I hadn’t noticed the open gate sooner. After all, it wasn’t the first time I’d let my dog into the back yard. Why hadn’t he run away? And why hadn’t I seen the open gate?
The importance of co-founders
What happened with the two dogs when I accidentally let them into my backyard with an open gate is the same thing that happens with people. Just like me and my dog, we get so comfortable in our surroundings that we rarely bother to look around. In my dog’s case, had he bothered to look up from his favorite tree, he’d have seen the open gate and wild expanses beyond it, and he, too, could have been running the neighborhood freely. For me, had I bothered to look at the yard instead of my phone, which is what I’m normally doing when I let my dog out, I might have noticed the gate was open and fixed it.
To be fair, this type of myopia is usually a good thing. Routines and stability are what help most people (and animals!) efficiently move through their lives. However, that same inability to notice when things change in our surroundings can prevent us from solving problems that seem intractable.
That’s what was surely happening to the founder I was meeting with. As we sipped our milkshakes, he explained his issue. Apparently, one of his “beta customers” — who was indicative of his entire market — needed to be able to integrate his startup’s software with their CRM platform in order to use it. However, for whatever reason, this CRM platform didn’t have a public API.
“If I can’t integrate with their CRM, I’m toast,” he lamented. “The entire industry uses this CRM, and every customer is going to want us to integrate with it. I’ve just lost the most valuable market.”
“Let’s talk through the issue a bit more,” I replied, “and we’ll see if we can figure out a solution.” Sure enough, by the time we reached the bottoms of our drinks, we’d identified a handful of things to try, and I was fairly certain at least one would resolve the issue. The founder appeared to feel much better, too, since he’d stopped lamenting his startup’s inevitable demise.
“Thanks, Dr. Dinin,” he said as we left the cafe. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“Happy to help,” I replied, “but let’s work on getting you a new co-founder.”
“I’m not worried about that,” he shrugged. “I’m honestly enjoying this solo-founder thing. I think I’ll go at it alone for a little while.”
Clearly he hadn’t understood the significance of our meeting in the way I had. He hadn’t realized that the real problem wasn’t whatever API issues he was stressing about. The real problem was his lack of having another person in the proverbial yard with him. He needed someone with a different perspective who could help him see the open gates.
And he’s not the only person. Every entrepreneur needs co-founders because we should always be surrounding ourselves with people who can help us see beyond the artificial boundaries of our routines, preconceived notions, and blindspots… even if sometimes it means we run into the road when we shouldn’t.
So, if you have co-founders, go hug them, and tell them how important they are because, if you’re anything like me, I suspect you haven’t done it in a while. Conversely, if you don’t have a co-founder, go find one. You might not think you need it, but that’s only because you’re like my dog who’s too busy peeing on his favorite tree to notice the world of opportunity around him.
P.S. Yes, I safely caught my mother-in-law’s dog…
