Founding Team Conflict: Prevention is The Best Cure

Let’s begin this session with a few questions:

• How is your relationship with your co-founder?
• Is this how you envisioned working together?
• How do you and your co-founder talk about sensitive topics?
• How do you and your co-founder manage internal conflict?

To maintain the well-being of your founding team, as is true in healthcare, prevention is always the best solution.

While I don’t know you personally, or your particular case, I can tell you co-founder conflict is all too common in the entrepreneurship world. Whether you are in Silicon Valley, Shanghai or Lagos, conflict that exists within founding teams generally follows the same set of universal patterns. That being said, founder relationships are still incredibly complex, as they encompass the many desires, motivations, contexts and worldviews of their highly dynamic individual founders.

“The relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.” — Paul Graham, Y-Combinator

Conflict between founders is not the kind of thing that can ever be truly “resolved,” nor should it be. However, by addressing conflict early-on and in a healthy way, you can transform existing conflict into a great benefit for your business and your business relationships.

Perhaps you were brought here by my previous article highlighting signs of breakdown in your founding team. Or maybe you are experiencing some turbulence with your founding team relationship and are looking for extra support to help you refocus on building your vision.

As startup founders, we are challenged to successfully navigate within the worlds of our customers, investors, team members and within ourselves. The following article is a combined effort from the team at The Resolution Co., and is dedicated to help co-founders prevent debilitating conflict.

5 Steps to Prevent Co-Founder Conflict by The Resolution Co.