Co-Founding Risks: The Homophily Effect.
The benefits of recruiting a Co-Founder from outside your social circle with different interests may outweigh the risks.
Every aspiring entrepreneur wants to have a successful business. They want to prove the doubters wrong and reap the rewards of all their hard work. Getting to that point is never easy, but there are certain steps that we can all take to mitigate the risks that may arise from pursuing new ventures. This blog post intends to shed some light (through personal experience) on the problems that may occur when you decide to co-found.
During my last year pursuing my BA in Business and Management in the United Kingdom, I was fortunate enough to make great friends and meet incredibly intellectual people who consistently challenged me to be the best version of myself. One friend, in particular, always kept me on my toes because he was as eager as I was to launch a new venture that he was passionate about. After a few discussions highlighting the pains that we felt in our everyday lives, we came up with an idea that we were very committed to. After the initial “honeymoon period” ended, we consistently found ourselves tackling the same problems and providing similar solutions. The reason for this? The Homophily Effect.
Homophily is defined as the “tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others”, essentially meaning that as humans, we have a preference to work/hang out with people who are similar to us. Unfortunately, I fell victim to this effect because I ended up co-founding a new venture with a person who had the same educational background as me. Because we both had similar backgrounds, we ended up providing similar levels of input to the business, which meant that different aspects of the startup (that required skills that neither of us had) were relatively neglected.
We both tried our best, but there’s only so far an idea will go when the two people who are solely spearheading all launch-related efforts have the exact same background.
What I intended to say is that, when we all go out to look for potential co-founders, it may be in our best interests to reach outside our social circles and find people who have different interests/backgrounds than ourselves. By doing so, we would open ourselves up to a whole new way of thinking that could really help at the early stages of any venture. Nevertheless, co-founding a venture with a person who has a very similar background to you doesn’t mean at all that the startup is doomed for failure, it just means that you may be limiting yourselves to a certain way of thinking when numerous other possibilities are out there at the early stage.
Here’s to hoping all of us have great success recruiting our co-founders and push ourselves to be the best versions of ourselves (our startups will definitely need it)!
