Kevin Systrom: The Co-Founder Working Relationship

Can you tell us a little bit about your working relationship? How who does what and has it always worked well? Have there been tensions that have come up? Tell us a little bit about how that works and then I'm going to let you moderate questions for the audience.

Great.

I think of all the co founders I know we probably get along best. I've definitely talked to co founder of Pairs that don't get along at all. I think what you need to do in a co founder relationship is not necessarily decide who's good at what, but realize that like any relationship, your goal is to figure out the other person and figure out your relationship with them. And through, I think the last year or so, we've really gotten into the groove of we own different parts of the day to day stuff, but at the same time we use each other to kind of bounce ideas off. You do a lot of like the iPhone client stuff, I do a lot of the CEO stuff of like accounting, et cetera, and do a lot of the back end coding as well. But what happens is because we both have our own specialties, but also overlap into each other's areas, it really provides for this nice relationship where you can bounce ideas off other people or get that person to say, are you sure you want to do it that way? And what has happened is it's that yin yang relationship that I really think has helped us succeed.

And it's hard to screen for ahead of time.

Like, we knew each other, we barely knew each other.

Barely knew each other. So we figured out that we could work together on a technical level by just getting together over a bunch of weekends and saying, let's build a little simple Facebook game. It's going to take a few hours, let's build it together, or whatever. And you can get sort of going. But a lot of it ends up being like, what's your gut feel? Do your reference checks. I said nice things about you. Thank you. Let's get going and let's see how it goes.

Yeah, it's an interesting. It's hard because I think no matter who you work with, you have to figure out. And this is actually more even for employees. It's like your relationship is gonna be a long one. Right. And if you're in the entrepreneurship world, your best ally is sitting next to you and you need to make sure to cherish that relationship because that's what gets you to the next level.

The biggest source of strife I've found is when there's a disconnect between expectations as to what you're building and how long you want to be building it for. And it's important to both of us that I can't imagine doing anything else in the world. I love doing this and I want to be doing this for a really long time and I love what I do. I love coming in and if people are like, oh, six months to a year, then cash out, that's going to be a really difficult. Unless you're both feeling that way and then that's a different relationship. But if you're in it for the long haul, make sure that the people you know are as well. It's a tough conversation and you might lose a co founder that way, like early on, like before you start. But it's much better I think, than going on and then six months later, like having that really, really like worn down relationship.

And looking back, by the way, just to finish off the thought, like I can't imagine starting a company without a co founder. I said that to you today. It's such a hard job to get off the ground. It's such a hard job to like recruit people to deal with, whether it's investors or press. Having someone across the way to be like, man, this really bummed me out or how do you think this? I actually think that's one of the things that has kept us going in 4 or 5am when we're fixing the servers or dealing with some issue. It's been fantastic.