Should You Live With Your Co-Founder?
Co-founders are essentially tied to the hip during those 12+ hour work days. But what if you took that to the next level and actually lived together? At Boost we had a thesis that if co-founders lived together they would be more productive, figure out founder disagreements faster, and create a better working relationship for the long term, so we made an active choice to provide housing in a hotel building for all of the companies we accept. At Boost, we have each team move into a hotel room with bunk beds for the three month program. After two classes, we can say that it works magnificently well, and that the companies see added benefit beyond what we predicted. Here is what a few of them said:
- Save money: “Living together also allows you to control your personal spend of company cash. It is clear when one of you needs new shoes for example, and when you can hold off to save your cash for another day.” — Gliph CEO, Rob Banagle
- Being on the same schedule: “We eat, work, exercise, and sleep at just about the same times. This allows us to be super productive. Luckily we also also get along well. Every night feels like a “sleep over” as we chat about our plans to take over the world / accounting software.” — AuditFile CEO, Kevin Bong
- Learn the ins and outs of your team: “It helps founders learn about their teammates and the team dynamics. Communication plays a key factor in making it through ups and downs together over a prolonged period of time. More importantly, as Steve Jobs once said, “great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people, and the total must be greater than the sum of the parts.” So when you get the opportunity to live with cofounders, you really develop a heightened awareness for the pulse of your team, which can make all the difference between winning and losing over the long term.” — Vaurum CEO, Avish Bhama
- Pressure cooker environment: “It is a great ‘pressure cooker’ environment and you tend to quickly find out if you can work with people by living and working with them simultaneously. For example, mediocre hires often drag out their tenure at a company with normal living/working arrangement. In a cohabitation situation, they can’t stick around for long and shouldn’t be tolerated for any length of time.” — AppFuel CEO, Andrew Boos
The closer people are both mentally and physically can be very beneficial to starting a company. With the proximity, comes speed. When you are in the same room all the time you don’t need to rely on an emails, texts or phone calls, which all have delays. In a startup things move fast and you must move fast with it.
Of course not everything can be beneficial. The most common problem living with your co-founders is having no alone time. So before you want to strangle your co-founder, go on a solo walk, trip to the gym, or a movie just to get that much needed alone time to recharge. Starting a company is a LONG journey and thus finding the right co-founders/team should not be taken lightly. But when it comes to the decision to live together or not, just remember, it’s no coincidence that some of the most famous startups of all time — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook — started up with founders that lived and worked together in the same room.
