Akshay Kothari argues two co-founders work best: they balance each other's low moments, while four becomes too many and breeds personal conflict. His company runs an anonymous forum called AAAAA where employees ask founders anything, plus weekly feedback sessions that catch small problems before they blow up.
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I'll say a few, but I think like there's a lot of— I think the cool thing about now is there's a lot of information online. And so I think you should definitely read every line of Venture Hacks because it has everything in terms of details of how these are structured. I think the other advice I would say, particularly with founders is actually— I actually think one is extremely hard, like just actually being a single founder. I don't even know how a single founder does it because there's so much stress on a daily basis. Two is actually for me has been ideal, like just working with Ankit has been really fun because there's been times when like I've been really, really like hit low in terms of like all the things that went wrong today. And Ankit is like in a medium and so we kind of like balance each other. And then there have been times when Ankit has kind of hit low and I'm doing okay because maybe the sales are okay. And so I think 2 has been really good for us in terms of just kind of balancing each other's energy. I think beyond 2, I think 3 is probably still okay, but I think 4 is too many. And so actually keeping your founders to maybe 2 ideally or 3, is good because then I think you have a couple of brains to think about, someone to argue something. If you're only founder, it might not have enough people to kind of really bounce ideas off of. But with 4, actually we were thinking about our personal issues more than we were thinking about ideas about the startup. I think it was just too many cooks in the kitchen at that point.
And the founder culture becomes really important, right, that actually creates the company culture in some sense. And that's why being very transparent with each other, giving open feedback, being constructive about each other's ideas, all of that happens very smoothly when you're 2 people. But when you're 3 or more it just breaks down because there's too many connections happening.
Yeah, I think open feedback is really key. I think Ankit and I started that in the first 2 months when we were working alone. And actually like in the company everybody can give feedback. We have an internal forum called AAAAA which is essentially like Ask Akshay and Ankit Anonymously, which is this like simple anonymous Google forum which anybody in the company can ask random questions to us. Like I don't know, like why are the toilets not working?
What happens in board meetings?
What happens in board meetings? And Ankit and I have to answer that every Friday. So every Friday before we do I Like, I Wish, I Wonder, we actually go through all the questions people have asked. And everybody has access to this doc, so they can see all the questions that other people are asking. And I think that open feedback loop is really, really important because I think one of the ways I think about it is that these like Small tremors are good for the earth. You don't want the pressure to build and have a massive earthquake. You want this kind of— you want the pressure to be released every now and then so that you don't actually have a kind of a big outlash against anyone.
