Co-founding a company with friends. Should you?
Starting a business with your friends makes a lot of sense and if you are thinking about doing just that, check our discussion about experience from co-founding and working with friends for more than 7 years.
For us, it's actually the only way to start one. Welder was built by the three of us, friends from high school.
Why have a cofounder though? Having one can be of huge benefit, you get extra manpower working for free. Another smart brain improving your product. But it can also bring a lot of stress and problems. That's why it's important to truly know who your co-founder is.
A great test to help you evaluate your friends? Take them on a week-long hike. You will learn a lot about them as well as yourself and your relationship.
Life can change easily even though everything seemed like rainbows and unicorns at the beginning. One of you can go through a difficult part of your life. Or maybe change your mind about what you actually want to do and achieve.
And that's where self-awareness comes to play. You really need to know your strengths and weaknesses. You need to be confident and be able to not take things personally. You have to know yourself so you can be honest and share personal issues with your cofounder openly.
We believe that part of our success is sharing our friendship above everything else. Together with being self-confident and not taking things personally. And knowing we are doing business together. A business may require making some hard decisions even between friends to survive.
What's your experience of starting a business with your friends? Would you recommend it?
It really depends on the type of friend. In my experience, the way you interact in private is almost the same as when you work together. There´s always a balance in giving in taking, following and leading. As you´re happy with this balance, it could work really well.
100% agree! Thanks for your input!
Honestly don't do it unless you would be ready to have a kid with that person. That's the level of stress and responsibility you're gonna be put through. Been here done that with a friend, eventually it exploded. Now my only cofounder is my wife and it works great :).
Wow, that's an interesting opinion. IMO those are two completely different things and I couldn't imagine doing business on this level with my wife (I don't have one, but hypothetically future one). It's just a different level of partnership.
Business is more straightforward for me. I want to have strong partners that are willing to take my words and opinions straighten up without grudges. And most importantly with the goal of building a successful (in any terms you find fit) business, thus making sacrifices for that.
On the other hand, marriage has a different goal for me, thus it would be really hard to make some hard calls in the business as I would be afraid about it having an impact on the marriage where the "levels" between partners are a bit different.
Like I am ok to say to my co-founder "hey, I don't feel like this is working, bye" and still being friends with them on some level, which would organically come out of that situation. But that doing with my wife would be another level of complicatedness haha
Oh that's not what I meant. You don't need to be literally married with your cofounder 😅.
I'm just saying, this thing is very hard. You need to have a level of trust that is similar to the one you would have in a marriage or parenting.
What would it take for you to have kids with someone, or to ask them to marry you? Basically: do you trust them with your family, health, money... and would you put everything in their hands if something bad were to happen?
I know it's a downer, but from my experience, it WILL get bad at some point. You need people you can count on when it happens. Don't want to ask the tough questions when it's too late.
If you do... be sure both of you have the same level of implication.
Starting and growing a business is a stressful experience itself, so you want to be sure how your partner reacts to this kind of stressful situation.
I personally don't recommend to start a business with a friend unless you have some experience working shoulder to shoulder with him/her in other circumstances.
On the other and there are some kinds of friendships that are super-strong and can really elevate each other's qualities 😄
yes and yes!
Nope.
Is the friendship strong enough to survive the stress brought upon by running a company? Is it worth to subject the friendship through that?
Depending upon the answer one has for those, one can take a decision on whether to take in a friend as the co-founder. But how strong the friendship may be, once friends become co-founders their friendship is not going to stay the same for better or worse.
I'd say don't get blinded by the "chemistry" you may have with your friends. After all, it's business, it's stressful and you should expect your co-founder to bring value to the table and be as involved as you are.
So if you want to keep the friendship intact and not risk what you already have, don't do it — you can always exchange knowledge, progress, insights and whatnot as long as there is no accountability or responsibility involved.
Obviously it's my two cents, and I'm judging from experience so idk 😂
No. I've done it a few times, each one thinking I had solved the issues of before. Like you, thinking we were self-aware enough, or communicate well enough etc. But it is simply too risky. If you value your friendship, think long and hard about going into business together because there are many pitfalls that can ruin your relationship forever.
I also KNOW that you'll read this and think "sure, but we're different" and I guess that's just a part of life, learning from your own mistakes. But it'll be a costly lesson.
I had a discussion with other founders and we all agreed that you will eventually become friends with anyone you are co-founding the business with.
Maybe our case is similar to that. Like we were friends in high school but we weren't like friends from kindergarten you know. And we started working on a project pretty soon.
So I believe that's an interesting combo. Someone, you know pretty well, but it's not your best friend in life YET, but they slowly become by experiencing this journey together.
And I truly believe that if you are candid enough and you communicate well you will eventually get through everything.
TOGETHER with setting some basic ground rules in the beginning. This was what I learned by a discussion with other founders here in Czech. They put the ground rules before starting the business. Some even got into really deep edge cases, which is insane by me, because I don't believe paper will help you when you are angry at each other anyway, but it might help set expectations straight which I believe is crucial.