Co-founder Conflict
We hear about co-founder dynamics a lot in the startup community, and I wonder if the traditional business&#x2F;technical dyad exacerbates conflict?<p>I am a technical co-founder, and that means I build things.  In a conventional co-founding relationship, I am be expected to give my business-oriented partner the final word with respect to strategy or direction, and he defer to me on how to build the product.<p>At the outset, this puts all the power in technology.  Nothing is more important than getting the right product built and shipping on schedule, execution is everything.<p>Unfortunately, at any significant scale it&#x27;s all strategy. Technology increasingly becomes a cost centre; either it works or it doesn&#x27;t, either it ships or it sinks. Strategic decisions begin to lead technology choices, and the CTO drifts away from the locus of power.  Even if she&#x27;s explicitly invited to participate in strategy, the buck stops somewhere she is not.<p>Influence, and with it ownership and personal investment, whipsaws from one founder to the other with neither realizing it explicitly.  Ultimately, technical founders almost always drift away (as we&#x27;ve seen most recently at Buffer) when the company hits scale and they&#x27;re fully vested.  And that sucks - any new blood won&#x27;t be as naturally invested in the product without further dilution, will lack history with the team, won&#x27;t know where the skeletons are buried, etc.<p>I hypothesize that balanced founding teams - two business, two technical, sales &amp; business, etc. would have more staying power in the long run.  Cases where there is no default division of labour and influence.  I <i>believe</i> I&#x27;ve seen this pattern, but without a neutral data set I can&#x27;t trust my biases.  YCombinator has enough data now to figure it out...  (\<i>nudge nudge\</i>)