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Jessica Livingston on Cofounder Disputes and Making Something People Want


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

All right, so now we're going to move on to another monster: co-founder disputes. I think people underestimate how critical founder relationships are to the success of a startup. Unfortunately, I've seen more founder breakups than I care to even count, and when it happens, it can crush a startup.

Be very careful when you decide to start a startup with someone. Do you know them well? Have you worked with them or gone to school with them? Don't just slap yourself together with someone just because they're available and seem good enough. You'll probably regret it. And if you start seeing red flags, do something about it. Don't think it'll just go away.

It's a red flag when you find yourself worrying whether your co-founder is trustworthy or whether he or she works hard enough or is competent. When founders break up for whatever reason, it's a blow to the startup's productivity and morale. If there's three in one leaves, it's not so bad, but if there's two and one leaves, it's hard, 'cause now you're a single founder.

Okay, now we come to the fiercest monster of all: the difficulty of making something people want. It's so hard that most startups aren't able to do it. You're trying to figure out something that's never been done before. Not making something people want is the biggest cause of failure we see early on, with the second biggest being founder disputes.

In order to make something people want, being brilliant and determined is not enough. You have to be able to talk to your users and adjust your idea accordingly. Ordinarily, you have to change your idea quite a lot, even if you start out with a reasonably good one. Remember this: website air bed and breakfast was a rather narrower idea when they first launched.

They started out as a site that let people rent out air beds to travelers for conferences. Then they changed to renting out air beds. Then they changed to renting out a room or a couch, but the host had to be there to make breakfast. Then they finally realized that there was all this pent-up demand to rent out entire places.

This evolution shows that you may begin with kind of a general vision of what your startup is doing, but you often have to try several different approaches to get it right, and sometimes you have to totally change your idea. Order Ahead, which lets you order takeout on your cell phone, was the founders' sixth idea. We funded them for the first thing I think they presented on demo day with the third idea, and it wasn't until Order Ahead that they hit on their big idea.

Even if you don't need to change the overall idea much, you still tend to have to do lots of refinement. One of the best examples of this is Dropbox. Here's a photo of Drew H during YC in the summer of '07. He and Arash were working on something that was obviously unnecessary, but the reason it was hard to predict early on whether they'd succeed is that there were lots of people doing this.

The way to win in this world was to execute well, and it didn't happen overnight. They had to get a thousand and one details right. There were a lot of unglamorous leaps between that photograph and this one.

Looks good, between starting the company and being on the cover of Forbes. You're going to have some dramatic ups and downs.

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