This is a guide to managing co-founder relationships in the future. It was written to help co-founders manage relationships and help mediators improve on their relationships. The reality is that they are not easy and there’s a lot of effort that also goes into managing one. I hope this helps!

I personally believe the following is best asked by a third party to help mediate issues that arise (like a third-party investor). Ideally this individual has no bias but wants the company to do well altogether.

Also - this list has been kept pretty short intentionally (culled from about 20 questions). It also assumes a software development company where 2 founders may be technical but can be generalised to other situations fairly easily.

Contents

Questions & Why

• [ ] Who’s vision are we currently executing on? Any changes on this vision?
• [ ] Who has the last say?
• [ ] How have you found your performance and how have you found your co-founders performance? What can you do better/worst?
• [ ] Any upcoming social events you guys have together?
• [ ] Do we need to consider any role switches or does anyone think they can do any particular activity better than the way it is currently done in the organization?

Now that the list of questions are out, let’s dive into why each of these questions were chosen (and particularly why they are phrased as such).

Who’s vision are you executing on? Any changes in the vision?

• Why is this important? While visions can (and should) change to reflect product direction and customer needs - they are usually the by-product of one person. However, it can be difficult to know where to take things. It can be easy to ignore vision by saying “we’ll just build what customers want” but that doesn’t provide a clear direction on where the product is heading - for example - the look, shape, feel, feature, voice, tone of a product can change depending on the vision.
• Any changes in the vision? Based on feedback, is this a vision that excites the founders and excites users? If there’s a disagreement in vision, think of why that is and what influences the vision? It can be hard to justify a vision or understand what influenced it. It can be harder for co-founders with different backgrounds to understand the vision and the pain point. For example, it is incredibly hard to understand the vision behind change management in consulting firms.

Who has the last say?