What are the benefits and drawbacks of founding a company as a team?

Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.

Today, Brett is chatting with Carlo Bellati: CEO of uDroppy, a Dubai-based marketplace with the vision of democratizing access to e-commerce entrepreneurship, co-founded by three lifelong friends.

Achieving the uDroppy Vision

To achieve that vision, uDroppy connects the diverse storefronts of online entrepreneurs with professionals in the supply chain pipeline, for instance: product suppliers, logistics centers, packaging, manufacturing, and any other necessary steps along the path to successful e-commerce. Uniquely, uDroppy includes software to automate tasks shared between the shop and supplier and provides a platform for both sides to have visibility across the work.

Catch the full episode in the player below, or on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… pretty much wherever you like to listen.

Key Takeaways

To Go Fast, Walk Alone. To Go Far, Walk Together

According to Carlo, uDroppy’s triumvirate management structure has been a major benefit — especially when compared to the examples of solo foundership that he has seen along the way.

“I have so much respect for any solo founders out there because it’s so much harder,” he says. “If you are a solo founder, when you are demotivated and that happens a lot of times. I think the number one reason why startups fail is because founders give up — and then the second is, of course, money — but the first reason is that founders simply give up. If you’re alone, then when you’re demotivated because something negative happens, it is just yourself staying the course. You are the only founder in the company, so even if you have employees, it is just not the same. It is you talking to a mirror, and you are talking to yourself. That’s much harder.”

“But when you are three,” he continues, “And you are demotivated and having to figure out how to get away from a challenge, you are three people at the same table talking to each other, founder to founder. That has been one of the key reasons why we are growing so fast — because we’ve been friends since forever; we aren’t just co-founders who met each other just for this business.

Sometimes it’s more time-consuming to work through disagreements. But most times it’s better for the mindset. […] Every time you go from the lows to the highs, it strengthens your friendship and your founders’ mentality as well. Every time you overcome a challenge, you become stronger, both individually and as a group.”

Follow Which Leader?

In a friends:founders situation like uDroppy, leadership has the potential to get messy.

“In friendships, you don’t have leaders,” Carlo says but admits that this kind of situation forces a structure on the team. “You might have a CEO, and then, like it or not, that person is the one in charge of the company. [At uDroppy] we are all three still founders. We are still on the same level. But sometimes the CEO makes decisions. That’s the hardest part: When, as friends, you are all equal, but then for the first time somebody is telling you that you have to do this.”

Brett follows that up with a few words on balance: “There can be avenues for addressing a power structure that’s not working,” he muses, “but ultimately there needs to be a way to make decisions quickly and without having to achieve full consensus.”

Fail Forward to Balance Innovation & Expertise

When you’re doing something new, it’s very difficult to be an expert, because an expert is someone with specific knowledge — but, then, if the thing you’re doing already exists in a way that it’s possible to be an expert in, that means there is no innovation there.

The idea behind uDroppy was so new, Carlo notes, that none of the founders had enough relevant experience to be ‘experts.’ To be frank, no one did.

“That was one thing that really challenged us,” Carlo says. “But then, eventually, after three years, we have seen so many things that now we all three are experts in the field, so now we’re ready to scale. But before it was just a nightmare to learn everything ourselves, and read so many books and so many articles, and try out things and fail.”

Keep the Faith

The founder journey, as everyone here is well aware, is hard. Unsurprisingly, uDroppy’s team journey is no exception.

“We had so many moments in which we realized: oh my gosh, cash is running out,” Carlo remembers. “In two or three months, we are going to fail. The platform doesn’t work. We are losing customers. We have to close the shop. I think we have had at least six or seven moments like that in these three years — but because we are so committed to the vision and because we are so strong as a team, every single time we might have one person who says we should close the shop, the other two are, like, What are you saying?! We’re not doing that!”

At one point, uDroppy was down to their last two weeks of the runway when they decided to launch a new revenue model as a last-ditch effort to bring revenue up. “That really worked, but that was a massive risk,” Carlo laughs. “But it definitely paid off.”