The search for a co-founder
Torn between giving away a part of yourself and taking the next step.
Whoever already started a business knows when I say that your startup feels like your baby, which is a weird emotional attachment when thinking more about it. However, it makes doing it also much more meaningful and creates a unique motivation to it. If you are someone who never went through this journey, it is probably quite hard to relate to this particular feeling and emotional relationship. In the following paragraphs, I will elaborate on the reasoning behind the decision to get a third co-founder on board, what we see as upsides and downsides as well as the emotional journey liked to this decision.
The reason behind it.
We have been working on pili since April this year. During this whole time, we continuously felt that we were moving forward. However, this changed over the last weeks, even though we have been finalizing the development of the first version of our platform. While being super enthusiastic about the development progress, we also noticed that the next step, getting users on it, seemed extremely far away. This was when we came to the realization that we need to get someone on board who can take over this big task of getting users on our platform — basically taking care of the commercial side of pili: marketing, sales, business development.
The upsides and downsides of another co-founder.
You probably think that the upsides and downsides are pretty obvious (and most of them are), but I’d like to share some of those you might not have thought of.
The first upside is the speed at which pili is moving. A very fascinating phenomenon is that you can literally feel whether you are moving forward fast or if you’re slowing down. It’s almost comparable to sitting in a car and feeling the different speed levels at which you’re travelling. I have to admit that this really impacts the way I feel and while starting a business is extremely challenging, feeling like there is no progress and staying positive is unbelievably difficult.
Another upside we saw is the fact that we are adding another perspective. With Romit and me living abroad for multiple years, we really value different point of views because we truly believe that it can only increase our chances of making the right decisions. In addition, we have been working on this idea for almost 9 months, which makes us lack an objective or new set of eyes.
One of the downsides we saw is that including someone that we don’t really know and giving him or her a significant part of the company makes us really vulnerable, especially since we put so much at risk with working on a startup for so many months without being able to take any salary. As you can imagine, both of us started off being really protective. However, we came to realize that we need to detach our personal feelings and see what is best for pili.
Lastly, another downside is the risk of choosing someone who does not have the same values as we have. This was and still is the most scary part for me because our goal is to build a long-lasting and impactful company, which is build on values such as trust, truthfulness, integrity, kindness and most importantly, open-mindedness. While other companies are mainly interested in previous work experiences and university degrees, I truly believe in international exposure and character traits that fit our way of thinking and principles. Maybe it’s just me, but I always believed that skills can be learned, however changing a person’s beliefs is much harder. Therefore, we will always hire for people and not jobs.
The emotional journey.
As touched upon in the previous paragraphs, making such an important decision does not only cost energy but especially efforts to come to terms with the fact that in order to attract the right co-founder, we need to be willing to give away a significant part of our business, our baby. This has been anything but easy for us. One day, we thought about all the time and long hours we put into pili as well as the platform that we were able to develop. On another day, we realized that without users on our platfrom there is little to no value in our business. This up and down in emotions has been companying us for the past couple of weeks, but this struggle has also allowed us to come to the decision to go our and find a third partner who is willing to get enthusiastic about our idea and vision to change the way we know services today. This thought of finding someone who is equally excited and passionate about what we do outweighs any concerns of giving away parts of our business. In the end, it is better to have a small piece of a large pie than a large piece of a small pie.
We hope that you realized while reading this post that one single decision in a life of an entrepreneur is so much more than you might think. Stay tuned for more insights into our journey of finding another co-founder.
