I talked to a startup founder this week whose business is growing steadily.
But he has issues with a cofounder. It’s killing his hope for the future of the business.
Cofounder problems are one of the challenging issues that can prevent a startup from growing up.
It’s one of the startup-killing dragons that I wrote about earlier this week in another post.
Cofounder issues will also prevent a serious startup from getting funded.
In this case, the cofounder was more like the first investor who didn’t actively work in the business.
And they have fundamental disagreements about how to run the company that aren’t getting resolved.
It is preventing the full-time CEO and the team from wanting to work in the business any longer.
So it has to be dealt with one way or another.
Major cofounder issues can’t be left unresolved if you are trying to grow something big.
The bigger you get, the more valuable your company is. The more valuable the company, the bigger the $$ involved and the bigger the cofounder issues become.
So I told this founder that this problem needs to be solved sufficiently enough that he and the team would be excited to put 5+ hard years into the company.
It also needs to be solved permanently and cleanly if they ever want to raise money from serious investors.
So find a way to permanently solve the cofounder issue asap.
Or go start another venture.
Lesson learned.
