Is this YOUR company or OUR company?
Being a cofounder is about more than just being there at the beginning. And handing someone the wrong role can turn into a costly mistake.
Let’s talk about how to avoid that.
Yesterday, I got a very eloquent email from “Julie,” the client manager at a small consulting firm that does high-tech software development in and around the Valley. The company is early, but scaling up pretty rapidly. Julie was there at the beginning, helping the founder get his act together to parlay his super-strong coding skills from a solo gig into a full-service development shop.
Julie was struggling with whether or not she should be given cofounder status and equity. She was worried about missing out on what could be millions of dollars down the road.
Her boss established the company, and it still trades on his reputation. Thus, he believes that without him, there is no business, so the company should be his and his alone.
Julie was driving herself crazy with these three questions:
- Shouldn’t she be a cofounder?
- What’s her best argument?
- Should she walk if her boss doesn’t make her a cofounder?
Why the cofounder role can be tricky for any startup
I’ve been building startups for over 20 years, both on my own and with others. At those startups, I’m either:
- The singular individual who brings an idea to revenue-generating reality, and in those cases I’ve never taken on a cofounder.
- One of the primaries turning an idea from dream into plan into reality, so I should be a cofounder.
- The primary to execute a fully-baked idea, which means the cofounder question is indeed a question. Sometimes I should be, other times I shouldn’t.
- Brought in to scale an existing early startup, so cofounder is out of the question.
There have been rare times when I wasn’t made a cofounder and didn’t know enough to know I should have been. This burned, like, a lot of money burned. I’ve also been asked to make someone on my team a cofounder and decided…
