Fairness Matters More Than Skill Fit When Choosing Co-Founders

2022-10-23 original Startups

【Objection ①】

You should start a company with members who fill in the gaps you lack. If you are the engineer, find someone who can sell it. If you are good at marketing, find someone who can actually build it. It’s good to arrange your initial members so that the team as a whole has no holes.

【Objection ②】

Speed is what matters most in the early days. In that sense too, you should team up with members whose communication cost is low. Former colleagues from your last company, classmates from university, old friends — these people are already in sync with you on that front, so things often go well.

【Objection ③】

In any case, fewer is better. When you need extra hands, you can just borrow outside help. To preserve the purity of the initial idea, it’s better not to increase the number of stakeholders. Ultimately, if you can run the business by yourself alone, that’s the best outcome.

【The Kuzuryu Perspective】

All of these are correct, but they all strike me as technical arguments — the kind that amount to “just choose the appropriate option depending on the situation.” I don’t think there is a universal, fundamental answer here.

So what actually matters when choosing your founding members, the people whose fate is tied to yours? There is one point I weigh most heavily when choosing the members I go into business with.

That is Fairness.

I think one characteristic of the early stage of a startup is that it carries some kind of imbalance. In most cases, the ideal state described in Objection ① is not sufficiently met. In situations like that, you need to judge fairly and act on it: what can be done, what can’t be done, whether this experimental result is a success or a failure, whether to move forward or go back.

Sometimes you have to choose a bitter option yourself. In moments like that, you cannot work with someone who postures, who fudges things, who lies — and that’s true of anything, not just startups.

Another characteristic is that you have to be able to wield both subjectivity and objectivity yourself. Since a startup is a small team, you have to play the dual role of building something yourselves and evaluating it yourselves. Naturally, you love the product you built yourself. It couldn’t possibly have flaws. But if you release it to the market as-is, you’ll be exposed to frighteningly critical feedback. To prevent that in advance, you need to look at things by switching between subjectivity and objectivity. People who can do that possess Fairness.

I touched on solo founding versus multi-person founding in another section, but from the standpoint of Fairness, a one-person company does tend to make judgments that lack fairness. Because you’re alone, your thinking easily becomes biased. So being surrounded by people who properly criticize you, who properly take it in stride when you criticize them, and who can then have a constructive discussion with you — building a business surrounded by such people is, aside from any talk of success rates, an indispensable factor for fully enjoying a startup life without regrets.

The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please get a copy.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/10/1245/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.