What Makes A Good Co-Founder
The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Perfect Co-Founder For Your Startup
Are two heads really better than one?
It’s a question I’ve seen come up a lot: How do I find a co-founder? What’s the right number of co-founders? Who should my co-founder be? How do I find the right co-founder? Having the right co-founder for your startup has major benefits. First, it’s a great way to get extra marketing and fundraising skills. Also, it gives you someone to bounce ideas off of. They might even have a better understanding of your target audience and industry than you do. So, how do you find the right co-founder? The best co-founder for your startup finding the right co-founder is one of the hardest tasks in business. But if you’re serious about running your startup, you have to spend some time thinking about it. Of course, you’ll want to look for good business partners too.
Starting a business is really hard. Running it is even harder and more stressful. Startups require far more time and effort than an 8-to-5 job. With so much money on the line and consistent threats from the competition and the risks involved, it is nice to have a partner in your journey who shares your vision and on whom you can lean on, especially in tougher times. It’s tempting to think that you can do it all by yourself. But that’s not always feasible. Co-founders are one of the keys to a successful startup. It’s a decision that will have a huge impact on the success of your business, so it’s important to make sure you’re partnering with the right person from the get-go. But how do you find the right co-founder? We’ll walk you through finding the perfect co-founder for your startup.
Finding The Right Co-Founder
There are a few ways to go about finding the right co-founder for your startup. But before you begin the hunt, you need to know the number one factor that determines the success or failure of your company. Your co-founders. Most people don’t realize it, but there is a high correlation between the success or failure of your company and the quality of your co-founders. That’s right — the quality of your co-founders is more important than the number of co-founders you have! Why? Because they will influence and impact your business. They will be your first customer. They will recommend you to friends and colleagues. They will become an investor in your company. And they will help you raise funding for your startup. So how do you find the right co-founder? It boils down to one core component: communication.
Communicators First, Founders Second
If you are looking for a co-founder, look for someone who can communicate well with you. No matter how different your skill levels are, you can work together well if you know each other’s goals and methods. That requires you to make sure that you’re aligned regularly. That can only happen if you speak to each other face to face.
Communication is a trust-building activity. When you don’t understand something in the business, you will need to make sure you talk to your co-founder and find a common understanding. You don’t need to be an expert in everything they do. However, you should have a solid grasp of the why and the how of their contributions to your business.
Getting to know your co-founder
When you begin talking to possible co-founders, find out how much they care about empowering people. It’s a good indicator for several important things: One, their willingness to help your customers, two, their focus on building a problem-solving product, and lastly, their perspective on building and enabling a great team inside the business.
Enabling and empowering people is at the core of entrepreneurship. Co-founders have to empower each other to do their best work. This is so much easier if they have a burning desire to make the world a better place for everyone. If your co-founder cares as much as you do, you are aligned along a fundamental axis. They might be more into marketing or development than you are, but their real goal is to build something that lifts everyone. And that is what you can expect from a business that lasts.
The 5 traits of a perfect co-founder
1. Trustworthiness is key
Having a co-founder who can carry out your tasks and responsibilities with integrity is crucial to a startup’s success.
When you’re involved at the ownership level, there are so many ways for money to disappear and for people to be dishonest. Even beyond cash, there are things a person can do that might call the ethics and morals of a company into question. Those things don’t have to be illegal to permanently damage your business, either.
Find someone who is honest. Communicate up-front that there is an expectation for 100 percent honesty at all times — no exceptions. Remember, finding the right partner isn’t just about skills: It’s also about character.
2. Aligned Vision and Values
Mutual values and vision are difficult to identify but crucial for compatibility. Before you commit to a partnership, make sure you and your potential partner are on the same page as far as the vision of the company and the values you hold. A great co-founder has to be someone with whom you have a shared vision. When opening a business, you need to have goals and aspirations. If you are looking for a partner, they have to share the same goals and aspirations for you to align your vision together.
A co-founder who brings a financial investment is terrific — and might be the one thing you need to get a startup off the ground. But, even more important — and hard to find — is a co-founder who recognizes your drive, mission and passion, and shares it.
You’re starting a business for a reason, and uniting over a common interest is a typical way for two founders to come together.
That’s what brought together Gary Lambert Jr. and Zack Carpenter, the founders of Cyclops Vapor, an e-liquid manufacturer. Driven by the desire to produce a quality product that made it easier for people to stop smoking, the two shared a common passion that propelled their company to the top in their industry. As Carpenter says, “We enjoy what we do here. It’s not just about the profits. We have the ability to help people, and it’s pretty awesome.”
“More than likely, your co-founder will be a person with whom you’ve had shared experiences,“ says entrepreneurship and Entrepreneur.com contributor Neil Patel. “Through such experiences, ‘true motivations are revealed, not declared.’ In other words, you know each other in more than just a superficial way.”
Before you jump into business with someone else, make sure the person you’re working with is committed to the same core values. It’s costly to give up a percentage of your company to someone who quickly loses interest.
3. Skills That Complement Yours
You don’t want your co-founder to be a replica of yourself. While it might be appealing to geek out together about the same things, you want someone who has a different skillset.
- If you’re a programmer, she should be a marketer.
- If you’re a designer, he should be a developer.
- If you’re an introvert, she should be an extrovert.
Look to the future of the business when you consider complementary skills. If, for example, you anticipate selling a product to the Latino community, you should identify someone with the ability to speak Spanish or who has experience in a Spanish-speaking market. If you know that you’ll need funding, find someone who can speak eloquently and persuade effectively.
4. Eagerness to Learn
A good co-founder isn’t someone who has life figured out. Sure, you want someone who’s been around the block a few times. Experience is a great teacher. But the people best suited for startup life are those who want to learn more.
In any startup, you’re going to learn. A lot. The more you learn, the more you’ll grow — personally and in business as well. The concept of constant improvement is a strong value to have. The people best suited for startup life are the ones ready to learn more and take the business beyond what either thought was possible.
5. Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence or EI “is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.”
General success in life is built upon the ability to effectively manage one’s emotions. In the rough-and-tumble environment of a startup, EI is especially crucial. Emotionally erratic people can indeed make successful business leaders, but they usually don’t do it with a cofounder in tow.
Startup life gives you plenty of reasons to lose your cool, cuss people out, fly off the handle, or crumple in a whimpering heap of emotions. But startup success demands that you resist the urge, stay calm, and keep going.
If your cofounder prospect has emotional intelligence in his back pocket, consider it a major advantage.
Wrapping up
This article does not intend to be the recipe for a successful team because, well, there is no recipe. A lot of people’s soft-skills (essential as well) will be shown in a more hidden way over a longer period.
This article solely aims to warn you about the compulsory characteristics that should be matched every time teamwork is required. And, you know, great teams carry out great executions.
Find someone who is equally excited when they talk about their work and who will glowingly speak about your business when they’re asked what they are doing. Even the most introverted character can capture the attention of a crowd with their enthusiastic portrayal of how you are impacting the lives of hundreds of customers. You want a co-founder that will do this at least as well as you do. If they lack the passion for your business when they speak to others, how much passion can they have for it when they talk to themselves?
Thanks for reading! ❤️
