How To Navigate Co-Founder Disputes
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The weirdest thing that sometimes with co-founders happens is if it doesn't go well, then it couldn't be me. It's got to be this other person. It takes two. That's the reality. You can like even be running a successful company and wake up one day and be like, holy shit, like, I hate my life. I hate my job. I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah, right. Yeah. I think in these relationships that are so intense is where we get so hurt.

Don't feel alone if you're going through this. It's actually very normal. I mean, this is why I think YC was special for me too. I like almost repressed this memory over the years because it's so embarrassing when I look back on it. Of course, like it doesn't matter. And all that debate only led to a bad outcome anyway.

Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. I'm Gary, this is Jared, Harj, and Diana, and collectively we've funded companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars right when they're just a few people. And today we're going to try something different. We're actually going to talk about co-founders and specifically co-founder conflict. You know, how do you work through that and what that means for your startup and actually for your life?

I feel like when I was starting my company, this is an episode that I would not have listened to because I was like, ah, stupid, like emotional crap. I just want to like write code and like learn about technology. And if someone had like,

forced me to sit down and listen to an episode like this and really think about this kind of stuff, that would have been the number one most helpful thing in my startup is actually the thing that held us back were all people problems. They were all issues like the ones we're going to talk about. Yeah. I mean, and that sort of makes sense, actually. I mean, what is a company if not people making pretty hard decisions, hundreds of them a week, maybe tens of thousands over the course of a year, and then these little decisions are

You know might be fraught might be obvious but either way either it's the right decision or the wrong one and then it compounds and so when you look at like one of these unicorns or these like Decacorn companies is you know, frankly big tech companies that are worth a trillion dollars those are the compounded decisions of Co-founders and you and your executives and so it all comes back to the very simple thing which is people in a room

fighting, not fighting, fighting fairly, not fighting fairly. Maybe we could start with Harge, who famously was one of the co-founders with Patrick Collison of Stripe fame today. What was that like? Well, it was definitely a long time ago. So it was 2007, 17, 18, 18 years ago now. How old were you? How old was Patrick? How old was I? I would have been 22.

And I think Patrick would have been 18, I think. The full story in that case was that I had actually applied to YC in late 2006 with my co-founder and my cousin, Corvier. And we were accepted into YC, I think, as the first international team. You were the first international team. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah.

I think it was maybe one Canadian team, but that counts. It's going to be American soon anyway. At the time, neither Corvira and I knew how to code or build software or do anything. We'd like hire these Eastern European contractors to build the whole website. And so a condition of being funded, I had started learning PHP and started like taking it over anyway. And so one of the conditions of YC funding us was that like,

we continue learning to program and build stuff. So we were accepting to YC in like winter 2007. I spent most of the time just like learning to code, learning to build software, like building our app and everything. Bozo. Bozo, yeah. We pivoted into automatic during the batch, but at the end of YC, I knew that we probably still, it would be great to have someone else like working on the software besides me. And

Paul Graham, the founder of YC, introduced us to this guy called Patrick. So you were actually also the first co-founder match at YC. Yeah, actually, not quite. We're really doing this live. I mean, the first one was probably Aaron Schwartz. We've read it, yeah. So it was a similar situation in that Patrick applied with this idea for, hey, like eBay meets Wikipedia. Our startup had pivoted into tools for eBay power sellers. And so...

PG was like, oh, you guys have this idea. You both want to kill eBay. You have this idea for building tools for sellers. This other guy's got this idea for building a better interface for finding products people want to buy. You guys could use another programmer. He seems like a really great programmer. Why don't you meet up and see if you want to work together instead of

Patrick doing the next batch as a separate company. And so we met up in London at the time. He was in Ireland and we went back from San Francisco because we didn't have visas to live out here. And we just got along really well. And we kind of did, I guess, a shock on marriage. We were like, hey, yeah, this is... We like hanging out. We spend the weekend together. We should totally just join forces and start the company. And how'd that go?

I think if I fast forward to the end, we sold the company. We were acquihired within a year. And largely because none of us were really that excited about what we were working on. I don't think either of us had really set out with our life's work is to kill eBay. For both of us, it had just been like a project.

That's where they just kept going. I think a year into it, we had raised a seed round. We weren't able to raise a series A. We were all sort of a little lower morale. And the Aquahire was sort of a really graceful way out.

Definitely interesting learnings from that co-founder experience. And I think the number one thing is like, I mean, Patrick wasn't suited to a sort of CTO role, as is very obvious now. He's sort of an extreme outlier founder and probably one of the greatest CEOs, you know, like probably of our generation. And I think...

It's hard to be co-founders with a personality like that when they're not the CEO. And I think in general, we see this- You find that out. I found that out about myself, actually. What did you find out? Oh my God. I mean, I also started Posterous with my co-founder thinking, oh, I'm, you know-

Some of it is like a little, I'm realizing like a little bit cultural. I was reading about how, you know, East Asian cultures just have a desire for high social conformity. And, you know, these are things that I didn't really examine. I was just like, oh, I'm just, you know, normal American kid. It's fine. But deep down, like, actually, yeah, I did not understand something about me, which is

I actually do want control. And the control comes from wanting to be able to fix it if it's broken. And I actually think that that is what the CEO actually is signing up for. Is like, if it is broken, it is up to me to fix it.

And, you know, if you're that archetype and you're in a role where it is not up to you to fix it because you don't have the authority to actually make all those decisions when you have to, it just doesn't work out well. Right. Like you find yourself in these sort of situations where you know that you want to do X, but

You know, it's not your job. Like someone else wants to do Y. And then, you know, what do you do? You could just like live with it, I guess. Or you could fight. Or, you know, sometimes you just have to be CEO. So you were the CTO. At Posturus, yeah. At Posturus.

When did you realize that about yourself? And next time you did it, you were the CEO. Oh, honestly, like I burnt out at my startup and that's when I realized it. My startup story was funny because I feel like it was a misapplication of the advice that you often get or we, you know, frankly often give. It's like in order for your startup to be great, you should try to have a great relationship with your founder and start

I didn't know what that really meant, actually. I thought it meant get along with each other and, you know, maintain concordance. You know, like if I believe X, but that other person believes Y, like, well, I could change what I think and let's go with what they say. And that's not a good relationship. That's like lying down. Like that is literally self-abandonment.

And then the weird thing that I just, you know, I did this for a couple of years. In the background, I also tried to be like the hero coder. You know, I take modafinil and, you know, literally work 20 hours a day. And I do, you know, I try to hero design and hero code the whole thing. And then meanwhile, when we would have disagreements about product or what the users wanted or, you know, ultimately when our users sort of flatlined, you

We had the deepest disagreement was like, "Well, what do we do from here?" My co-founder wanted to turn it into Google Groups. I just sort of went along with it. I thought like, "Well, I'm the CTO and I'm the 40 in the 60/40 split. I don't know if I want to fight over this." I just sort of went along with it.

My body keeps the score. You know, there's this long known book called The Body Keeps the Score that talks about when you don't work trauma out properly, it just like sort of lives in your body and it remembers. And so I actually had like a psychosomatic experience.

thing that happened where I couldn't sleep and I couldn't eat and I couldn't even like bring myself to go to the office. Yeah, I learned the hard way. I mean, you know, luckily, again, like also, you know, the great thing about Silicon Valley is the company we my co-founder ended up selling it to

Twitter for 20 million dollars and that was really meaningful for me and by then like Harj and Jessica and PG had peeled me off of the ground brought me over to YC so I mean the story ends well and at the time funny enough like I felt like the victim and then now like with a lot of hindsight like 15 years of hindsight I realized like I

shouldn't have blamed my co-founder like I did all those things I'm the one who self abandoned the things that I knew I'm the one who like didn't say the thing that I knew in my heart I imagine people are watching and maybe this is resonating for them they're like I know this is not going we're not making the right decisions we're not going in the right way my sort of thing for them is

listen to that right this is a lot a lot of this came from like my family upbringing and my situation style was like the function of my 10,000 hours of human intelligence training called my childhood and you know I think the more aware you are of what your sort of pre-training is like the

the more you can actually prompt yourself to not be like that. And I think that that's something that I've worked really, really hard to change and change that about myself. But yeah, I think the company could have been a 10 times or 100 times better outcome than that $20 million exit if I had figured that out at that right moment when we still had the mojo, people still knew what we were.

We could have done a lot of moves and ended up a little bit more like our friends at Weebly, who did charge money, turned their very active user base into paying customers. And I think they sold to Square for at least 10x what we did. And then Square stock, of course, went up another whole lot. So they really did it the right way. I mean, I did this other thing at work also. I'd build up a lot of things.

And then at the end of it, I would blow it up. That's the thing that I'm also actively trying to really avoid, you know, 99% of the time. It's like something that I do have control over is, you know, if I don't self-abandon, then I don't like sort of become into this like pressure cooker situation.

And then I'm not going to blow up. Like, you know, what I want to do is be authoritative. Like, how do I, you know, see something and say something at the moment that it happens instead of allowing it to, like, build up so much? You have a great line that you often say around here, Gary, about authoritative versus authoritarianism.

Maybe you can share the principle. I think it's like a deep thing. Yeah, I mean, founders in particular, your organization will just build up around how you approach things and how you talk about things and how you think about things. And so self-abandonment is kind of obvious. You're getting paid the big bucks. You have equity. You are there to render an opinion and your feelings matter and count. So self-abandonment kind of obviously is bad,

And then way over on the other end is sort of being authoritarian. Right. So that's not listening to anyone ever jumping to conclusions. You know, one of the deeper things that I have now learned is that every decision is

you know, might be fraught, might not be, you need to give it enough space and time for it to happen. And so for me, I was conflict avoidant. I wanted everyone to get along. And that desire would sometimes cause me to short circuit all the things I needed to do to get to a good resolution. And so being authoritarian in that case is basically like skipping ahead to the end result. You're like, well, you know,

I can't hold this conflict. This is too uncomfortable. Like, I don't like that people think this thing and, you know, I don't agree. So I'm just going to like...

We're just going to do this, right? And then that's not leadership. That's just sort of disregarding the people around you. The much better version is actually have a debate. It's good to have a healthy conflict where people say what's going on. And I regret that, right? Going back to my moment with my co-founder, Sitchin Agarwal, with Posterous, if I could time travel myself back to that moment, there's no reason why we couldn't have

had that conversation and I didn't need to control the outcome. I didn't really need to be CEO in that moment to have a better outcome than the outcome that came out. We could have had that conversation. We could have made that choice together. And because I burnt out, because I couldn't show up to work anymore, I short-circuited it and it ended up in self-abandonment again.

And then if you think about any company that you're running, like

You know, we are operating in these sort of uncertain moments where, you know, there's door A and door B. Everyone has different feelings about it. And so the important part is like, can you sit down with the people who you trust and really care about and you have your shared goal and then have like a good faith argument about it and then come to an agreement? And that's like what authoritative to me means.

I think a lot of what you're saying, Gary, resonated, resonates with my journey too. I think a lot of the journey with a co-founder is so intense because you're going through the high pressure of both of you really wanting to see this company succeed. You're pulling insane hours. You may not be sleeping. That's bad. Yeah. People should sleep. People should sleep. Yeah.

And you're also going through all these very intense decisions. And maybe up to that point, I didn't have the need to self-examine too much. And it's that pressure cooker that I realized patterns about myself that I didn't know. Like you described, same thing. We all have different history. We all come pre-trained with our model with certain default settings. My case, I was also grew up as an immigrant.

And I think the safe thing is not to speak up and it's just not rock the boat, keep things stable, right? So like you, there was things that I would not agree, but I would just not voice them because it was not safe from what I was trained on from my upbringing. And that kind of built up right.

And I think it was a process of really, it's a bit of a gift to go into the journey of more self-discovery. I wish I could have resolved things better. And it's still a work in progress to be able to sort of speak up. And it's a journey of

I think in these relationships that are so intense is where we get so hurt too, because we both want it so badly in a different direction. But I think it's also in these same relationships that we eventually heal too. Yeah. Where I think if you make it, we all make it, the message for everyone is that don't feel alone if you're going through this. It's actually very normal. I mean, this is why I think YC was special for me too.

I could talk to other YC founders like, oh, I'm not crazy. There's that and feeling that you're not alone. And the other part is like, okay, maybe up to this point before the startup, I was successful. I got by enough with how I operated in this world. But this new level of intensity, I needed to gain more control or power over myself and gain more of these kind of skills that are new.

And it's like a journey of becoming a better version for yourself, which is a gift. And that's the thing that if I were to give advice to myself is you're not alone and it's okay to kind of get more support. And as you talk to your co-founder, conflict will happen. Every relationship.

It's normal, right? Diane, do you have a recollection of like a particular conflict or was it like strategic or could be tactical, like things that were just like, well, I believe X and this other person, you know, who I co-founded this with believes Y. I mean, in retrospect, I don't think they matter that much. It's kind of the irony when we forward 10 years later, it's like it would have been fine, but it just they felt so life and death back then. That's interesting. Yeah.

because I'm living there, it's like, I don't know, 4K television version of it. Now in retrospect, little details of how to run the team or that, it's like, okay, I think it's fine as long as we get the high-level strategic direction right, which I think we did. So it was just being more

more engaging in the debate and being more open that's a good point yeah any given moment well you have your ego you have yourself you have like your concept of yourself and then all of that is wrapped up into like your identity which then merges with the startup and then the weirdest thing that sometimes with co-founders happens is um if it doesn't go well then it couldn't be me it's got to be this other person it takes two that's the reality yeah in my startup we had

an equally dysfunctional relationship, but the diametric opposite. So I started my company with a friend from college and we're both like American kids who grew up in sort of a classic American household. And we were both probably pretty spoiled by our parents and probably both pretty used to getting our own way. I think about our pre-training and you can imagine how that played out over the summer. We basically fought

like cats and dogs on every issue. I remember in particular, speaking of trivial issues. So our company was called Scribd and Scribd is a terrible name for a startup. No one can pronounce it. No one can spell it. It was like a thorn in our side for like 20 years. And the reason that we ended up with this horrible name is that we could not agree on what to call the company. We literally fought about it the entire YC batch. We probably spent

tens of hours debating what to call the company. It got so bad, we had to call in Paul Graham to mediate a dispute because we were unable to launch because we could not agree on what to call the thing we were about to launch. And I like almost repressed this memory over the years because it's so embarrassing when I look back on it. Of course, like it doesn't matter. And all that debate only led to a bad outcome anyway. This is something that I do see with a lot of the college age founders that we fund. We fund, you know, we've

here at the college age when we started our company and i i've just seen that like a lot of them just like

you know, like me and my co-founder, we just had not developed a good conflict resolution skills at the time. And so like, we would never do that if we were starting a company again now, because we've like learned how to let the little things slide. We've learned just like how to, how to solve things like that. But at the time we just like hadn't learned that yet. And so we would just go around and around in circles. How do people end up learning that? Like what, you know, one of the tools that I feel like I had to learn was, uh,

It's going to make me sound so therapy brain. But, you know, I actually really like this book called Nonviolent Communication because, you know, a lot of the arguments that you're having is like I have a certain mental worldview of how this is working and this other person has a different one.

And then in that context, like nonviolent communication talks about how you are totally free to talk about what's going on over here. But if Harj and I are fighting, like it's not fair for me to speculate or say anything about like his intentions or his motivations.

So if I were like, what's a concrete example? It's like, Harj, like you just think that I suck at vibe coding, don't you? That's a judgment. Yeah. And so that kind of thing, honestly, like, I mean, whether you're married or like in a co-founder relationship, like it's very easy to fall into that type of trap. It's just learning to be better humans, right? And a lot of it is...

We don't know really what's people's intentions because those are really within them. And sometimes we ourselves are not aware. But what's observable is the behavior, what people do and how you feel. And those are OK things to call. I mean, things that eventually learn to do with managing people and engineers is not to say, hey, you know,

You're a bad engineer. That's just really demotivating for your report, right? Or your co-founder is like, oh, you suck at coding. That's just not helpful. What is helpful is like, hey, I saw you checked in this code and it didn't do the QA test and other unit tests as we had agreed. This is something that we can improve on, right? And if you do, then...

We have to test it less and it's better for everyone. So I think the framework has to do with pointing specific things that people can improve instead of making broad strokes that kind of almost do a bit of a character assassination because people make mistakes. And part of it is pointing specific behaviors.

And then the other thing is giving them a carrot. If you do it and change it, this is how it's good for everyone. That's part of the NVC that makes it a win-win, shaping a lot of the specific behaviors and things that make it people can act on and is less...

Less of an attack, right? Because it's nothing about me fundamentally as a person or as an engineer. It's just a thing that I did. And sometimes I'm not sure how it happened, but whatever. But let's just get the output to be fixed. However you do it, if you do it, we can win this way. So that's how a lot of what I learned about getting better feedback, which I think is similar for me.

framework from the NBC and there's this touchy-feely class from Stanford where they talk about throwing things over the net describing the net you want to describe the net

I think the idea is it's basically like in any communication, there's like sort of your reality, like the way you're experiencing it and all the assumptions you're making about what's going on. And then there's the other sides. And like in conflict, it's totally fine for me to talk about everything on my side of the net, like from the frame of here's like how I'm feeling. Here's kind of like...

here's how it feels when you say I'm not a good vibe coder. Like, so I'm all like, this is my area. I can talk about as much as I want, but I can't go over the net, which is like, you're a bad engineer or something. Yeah. Or try and tell you like, try and tell the other person, like what,

their feeling or what they're thinking. And like, I think there's a real natural human tendency to do that. Like you, you assume that like, if Gary says I'm a bad vibe coder, it's because he's like, wants to hurt me and he's mad at me or like something like that. And that that's the concept of going over the net is like, I don't know what's going on in his head actually. And the only way I can understand it is to like ask him directly versus making lots of assumptions.

Yeah, you don't know. The only thing that you can do is the observe thing that maybe the code that was shipped with vibe coding did this or that, but not the intention behind it, right? That's the concept over the net, which is overall good communication with anyone, not just for managing.

co-founders significant others friendships just to be overall a better human yeah I think you spend so much time with your co-founder or your spouse honestly that like you can easily get into this moment where it's like very at like one-on-one adversarial the bad version of this it sort of becomes like tit-for-tat all of the arguments sort of like bleed over right that's like probably a really good tell for something's wrong and maybe you should get you know

an exec coach in there to help you work through these things because basically if it's like every conflict is like an everything conflict you're like okay well whether or not this button is red or blue if you view that conflict in the context of like all the other conflicts you've had that week month or like in your entire life there's bleed over and then can you imagine like how are you going to make a good decision about like whether that button is like red or blue like it's

It's not really about whether it's red or blue. It's about like who wins and, you know, is there a point system? Like, well, last time you won this time. So and it's like at that point, like, hey, what about the mission? Yeah.

What about the thing that we're out here to do, which is get users and make something people want? Where does this decision fit within that? Or am I just in an adversarial position with someone else? The idea of the pre-training or just the context, I think, is a really interesting one. If I think back to my experiences, first startup, it was a long, long time ago now. But I actually think, so when I think of myself and

Patrick and then Corvier, in many ways we actually had similar communications. We never actually had any outright major arguments or shouting matches or anything like that. I think we all actually got along really, really well. And actually anytime we were talking about anything other than the startup, it was great. I still have very happy memories of that. We had similar intellectual interests and it was just great.

But I think when it came to the startup, fundamentally what was just going on is I think we were at a point where no one could really be motivated to the max or I think do their best work unless they were actually the CEO and had the final say on things. So I think the way it manifested in that context was just I don't think any of us were going 110%. Each of you went on to become CEO yourself. Yeah, exactly. And then the second time around, I think...

One thing that I learned was just yeah like the the context that people have or like the cultures They've come up in both personal and work matter a ton and they're a very concrete example and

My co-founders with Triplebyte, my second startup, were early employees at Justin.tv, which later become Twitch. Justin.tv was notorious for, was known for having an early culture of like extreme aggressive heated debates. And it started with sort of two of the co-founders in particular, but it was just part of the culture was that you would just like,

like the co-founders would just like shout at each other and scream at each other and like, and that employee, and that was just kind of normal. And so my two co-founders, this was their first job out of college. Um, and so they kind of just thought that it was,

If you're not shouting. That's just how it works. People are like screaming and shouting at each other all the time. It can work. I mean, if it's an opt-in culture, I guess. I don't know if it was actually shouting. My mental image of it was more like vigorous debate, like debate society debate, not like

From what I've heard, it was both. Like Steve Ballmer throwing chairs at each other. Whatever the details, I think if you grow up and you have this one type of culture where it's just an outright, extreme, aggressive debate is kind of the way you get to the truth and you win. It's not the culture that I can really work particularly well in. I think if I'm in an environment where there's people shying and screaming, I kind of just like...

like can't really think clearly to me it's like shouting and just kind of like overly he debate just means you can't think clearly about stuff and so you're just going to make bad decisions and like i'm not sort of making a judgment on like what's right or wrong but it's like if you have like one view of hey like this is kind of what this culture means like we're going to make bad decisions and the other person kind of feels like oh well like this is the only way you can make good decisions like that is just going to constantly create

conflict between co-founders so they don't have like shared context. How did you when did you figure that out? Because there's a lot of self-examination when you decide to go into a new co-founder relationship. I mean I think it was pretty obvious well this was for me was an example of just you can know people in social context and then like the work context is very very different so I know I knew both my Tribalbyte co-founders for kind of years before we started the company but only ever probably more in like

social low stress environments. People are very, very different in high stress environments. And I think this is one of the things we've seen in the batches too, is you should generally found a company with people you know, but it's still not a guarantee that it's going to work out because you might have been social friends and you've only ever hung out watching movies and playing chess and doing fun stuff. So you don't know how you're actually going to react under stress. How did that play out with...

Triple bite hurt. Yeah, I think it's kind of in high stress situation. Well, once we were in high stress situations, which are many in a startup. Yeah, like I it was sort of the dynamic would always be the way my co founders handle it, I think they would get the best out of themselves is like, aggressive debate. And for me, it's like, I think we should just like, calm down and maybe write out our thoughts or just like, it's like a totally different. And so just like a total mash of styles. And I think,

my way of handling I mean it was pretty apparent pretty quickly I guess my way of handling it was I should adapt and like um and maybe there's something I can learn from like that culture and sort of in general a lot of my desires to start up was like personal growth and like wanting to get

better I was like okay well it'd probably be helpful for me if I can like just get better at handling like more aggressive debate and so I will just like sort of mold myself into being able to like do that and handle it and I do actually think there was value in that like I certainly like there is certainly value in being able to like

handle more aggressive debate and just like a different culture but I think the way it then played out is like four or five years into the startup it was actually just a huge tax on me personally and sort of part of the reason I kind of burned out and just decided I wanted to move on and hand over the CEO range was like like I'm just like exhausted like actually for me kind of like being in this culture and kind of trying to always be like the bring it back to the middle or turn the temperature down was just exhausting for me personally. What advice would you give

to co-founder relationships that have this? There's all these unknown unknowns that only play out in high-stress scenarios. And how do you grow towards each other to make it actually effective for the company and be there in the long run? Yeah, would you have done something differently knowing what you know now? Yeah, I wouldn't have adapted. I think that's, yeah, I think the number one thing is I just wouldn't have, yeah, I would not have tried to adapt, actually. I would have, like,

Maybe a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Maybe there's a little bit amount of where it's helpful, but yeah, I think in general, if you're the CEO, you have to intentionally shape the culture to get the best out of yourself.

And again, maybe we all have different upbringings, but there's sort of like this, I think you put it like the servant leadership model, which I think is very natural for me and other founders I've spoken to. And that's like, oh, you have to sacrifice yourself for the greater good, which is the org. And so you have to kind of mold yourself into what the org needs.

And yeah, I think that is... And there's an asterisk. Yeah. There are limits to that. Yeah, exactly. I think we've all found various forms of that limit ourselves, personally. And again, I think this is basically why a lot of the founder mode has obviously caught off. And it's sort of caught off in the late stage context. But I think it actually is this underlying thread. It's a journey that lots of founders go through, and not just in co-founder context. But it's like you start the company, you kind of mold yourself into whatever you need.

for the company and the org to succeed. And you can even be running a successful company and wake up one day and be like, "Holy shit." "I hate my life. I hate my job. I don't want to do this anymore." Yeah, right. And very specifically, it's like you ended up in a culture you don't enjoy working in. Again, we're talking about it in the co-founder context, which is if you and your co-founder have totally different frames of reference and ways of getting the best out of yourselves- That's going to be hard. Yeah, it's going to be hard. But then

If you're like a public company and you hire a bunch of execs and the execs all have like totally different ways and they like become the dominant frame, then you're like basically in the same spot where you're like trapped. You're the founder, but you feel trapped. And I think a lot of the founder mode just captures that energy of actually like you have to stop adapting yourself at some point and make the org adapt to you to get the best out of you. I think that was very well said. I think part of the journey is that for a lot of foundering teams, I think they should really...

get a lot of help outside of the company as well. I do think founders should probably get at some point like a coach, a therapist to examine a lot of these things because a lot of these are kind of brewing in the background and you don't even know how to articulate it, how to put it into words, what framework to use to even know that you're going through this transition, this is happening, this is what is needed of me at this point. And you kind of need this

partner, outside partner to hold a mirror for you to know that, hey, Harsh, you're going through this. It was fine to mold yourself. The company got to this point, but you got to make home for yourself to be able to live in it for a long run for a company because the founder is the one that's going to stay. So what are the things that you need to keep changing? And as founders, it's a very tough position to be in. You have to keep reinventing. Yeah, I agree with that. Therapy definitely helps.

helped me introspect on a lot of this stuff. I think if I had started therapy sooner, it would probably, yeah, I would have stopped adapting myself much sooner. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I did it just because like I started the company and I'm like, I'm normal. I'm fine. Like I'm just like everyone else. Like I have no problems. And it turns out like that was not correct. So guys, I can imagine there could be some people who are listening to this and they're thinking to themselves,

wow, this co-founder shit seems like really hard and like a lot of work, like screw that. I'm just going to not have a co-founder. So I don't deal with all this bullshit. What would you say? Like, no, I mean, like I'm, I'm kidding, but like, I'm also serious. Like, like, like I actually think a lot of people feel that way. What would you say to those people?

I think the uncomfortable thing to say that I think is true is only the truly superlative founders end up making products and services that are superlative. Like it or not, in order to create something of great value like that,

game recognizes game. So when someone is truly like recognizably good as an engineer or as a designer or as a product person or as a CEO or salesperson or whatever, it gets easier to find a co-founder because other people are like, that's the person who is like the best person I've ever worked with. The act of starting a company is like getting into a rowboat.

And it's like, we're going to row out in the middle of the sea and we're going to find like, you know, the island of gold. Right. And it's like, do you want the other people in that rowboat to be the most capable people who are like super fierce and like, you know, never say no? Or do you want them to be okay? And so I, you know, you know, we've been talking about a lot of the psychological parts of it, but a co-founder, you know, is a little bit of a test, like,

Are you yourself like someone who someone else would say, hey, like that person is the best at that thing. And like, let's go do this thing. Like game recognizes game like attracts like. And some of it is like, man, if someone's having a really hard time finding a co-founder, the advice might actually be like, you're not at the edge of human capability yet.

And, you know, that's okay. Like, you know, some of it is like find a way to get there because then you will find the other people who are, you know, sort of rolling in that direction and you'll just look to the left or right. And it's like you,

you guys will recognize each other and then you'll be able to create something really great but i mean the the other reason to have co-founders that like i think just bears out is like a bad co-founder is uh definitely worse than being solo but the best possible world is like having someone who is alongside you who is mega gets you and when you're having a bad the worst day

know and everyone does like you know ideally your co-founder is there to just pull you up and like likewise and um you can go way farther for way longer and create way more awesome things with people who you know hey they're your people startups that work are so rare you sort of need it all like you kind of need like every possible advantage you can get

Yeah, going for no co-founder is just sort of a limiting downside type optimization. And that's just like not the right way to think about startups. Yeah, to your point. I guess you will have less stress in theory if you don't have a co-founder. But then, yeah, the truly exceptional breakout companies have a really great, healthy co-founder relationship. Yeah, to say, I mean, it's a variant of the like, why do people raise VC funding argument? Where it's like, you don't have to raise VC funding. Like you just like grow...

You could grow like within your revenues, for example. It's like you totally could. But yeah, you have to kind of you have to play to win. And actually, like the way to win is to attract all the resources. It's like get the capital to get the best people to win the market and be dominant and take it all. Yeah. If you don't play to win, someone else is going to play to win. And guess who's going to win? Yeah.

I think Harj and I like texted this to each other once. It's, you know, if you don't want to have people problems, then, you know, you need to live on an island totally alone with no one. This is the Rene Adler philosophy. It's basically just like all...

problems are actually like people problems and interpersonal problems um and that if you want to have no problems then yeah like go live alone on an island and you have like theoretically no problems but yeah if you actually want to live any form of like fulfilling life you have to you need to be part of a society in a group of people and you have to work through the problems and get good at dealing with them and get good at handling conflict and

and working with other people if you want to achieve anything. I mean, all the things we've been talking about, like, you know, I mean, I think we've been pretty vulnerable and talked about like some pretty painful things, but that's the fun a little bit. Like that is literally the work. Like Alan Watts has the saying where it's like a lot of people in modern society run around like,

And they're just trying to get to the end. They're like, oh, my God, like, let me get to all the way to the end. Like, you know, do I need to get done with this? Right. And then that's sort of like going to a symphony and just like instead of the concert playing out, they just play the crescendo at the end. That's it. Everyone files in. It just goes like this.

And then that's it. You're done. And it's like, no, that's not, you know, like the journey is actually the fun part. Like the act of being, you know, not going over the net. Like you can't learn to play tennis and not go over the net if you have no one on the other side of this. And so, yeah, I mean, whether it's co-founders or in your, you know, relationships, I don't know. It feels like all the same lessons a little bit. And this is one game that is actually worth playing.

With that, we'll see you guys next time on The Light Cone.