#2: How to find a co-founder

Welcome to How to Be a Founder, where we'll explore the challenges behind early-stage company building, and I hope support some founders along the way. I'm Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, and I'm here with my co-founder and now co-author, Alice Bentinck.

Alice, hello.

Hello, Matt. Together, we've worked with thousands of founders to build companies now worth over $10 billion. Over this podcast, and with our newly released book, How to Be a Founder, out now, please do go and buy a copy, we'll be sharing with you the insights and knowledge we've learned while working with real-life early-stage founders on their questions. You can think of us as your startup agony aunt and uncle.

So sit back and get listening, and we'll try and answer your burning questions on how to be a founder. So our topic this week is how to find your co-founder, which obviously is a topic that we have spent a lot of time thinking about over the last 10 years and features pretty heavily in the book.

EF is basically all about finding your co-founder. And this was definitely one of the big questions behind Entrepreneur First, is whether we could turn strangers into co-founders. And we've now built more than $10 billion worth of companies through this very unusual model of taking groups of strangers and helping them find their co-founding teams. So, I feel we do have some really often counter-status quo insights here that I'm looking forward to sharing, particularly with our guest, Matt, what do you think is the one or the most controversial thing that we believe about finding a co-founder that others don't?

Well, I think you sort of already said it. I think the idea that you can or should start a company with a stranger was really extremely out there back in 2011. I think even today, in a lot of places, it's very non-intuitive. And I do think that, you know, one of my big beliefs about this is that Because it's been so unusual historically to start a company. Most people do not start companies. All the conventional wisdom that's been created about how to do it is based on a really small and actually quite atypical sample of companies. If you get VCs to write pieces on how to find a co-founder, well, they're just going to draw on examples that they've seen in the past. But of course, because no one before EF had tried to systematically find good ways to help people found companies with strangers, Of course, that sample is all people that knew their co-founders organically. So of course, conventional wisdom is that's how you have to find them. And so I think the bit that I hope is the distinctive contribution of EF and particularly of the book is to say, okay, so how do you do this systematically? How do we remove this huge bottleneck from the global innovation process of requiring that anyone who starts a company has to happen to have in their network someone who is really capable, has all the right skills, all the right attitudes and behaviors, and is ready to start right now, and you've known them for many years. And that seems to me like a crazy bottleneck to have. And so, you know, this controversial idea that we started with, I think the cool thing, and I think the thing that we'll talk to Milad about, is how do you take a set of frameworks to actually make that possible?

One of the analogies we often talk about is this does already happen in the world, as in strangers forming lifelong partnerships. That isn't new. Online dating has been around for 30 years now and has gone from something that was quite outsider-y, unusual, niche, to being the most common way that people find their spouse. And I think there are some really great analogies where, you know, the best spouse or co-founder for you isn't necessarily in your very small social circle. It might be 1 degree away, it might be 2 degrees away, it might be someone that you have absolutely no connection with. And I think this, you know, what online dating has enabled is a much more effective and efficient searching, sorting, and selection process for finding a spouse. And I think there's a lot the startup world can learn from that in terms of, well, how can we help people search for co-founders more effectively? How can we help them select co-founders more effectively, and then have a framework to make it possible to commit and build a solid foundation for their company with that co-founder? So I think it's still definitely not the norm to co-found with someone that you don't know. But, and we go to go into the process in a lot of detail in the book. But It does work, and it can work. And I suppose my personal bias would be, I think you can build better co-founding teams when you co-found strangers, or when strangers co-found together, because they're making such an informed choice about committing to each other. It's not the co-founder of convenience. It's not your just best mate who happens to be available. You're actually evaluating and analyzing whether you should commit to spending a significant proportion of your life with this person. And so, it is a very, very informed decision. And actually, if you look at the breakup rates of EF companies, and we've been doing this for, you know, very, very long time now, they're very, very low, which I think always surprises people. But it's because our teams go through this intense testing and selection process. So, they're making a very informed choice at the point where they commit to each other.

Yeah, I think the thing that goes through people's heads when they hear start a company with a stranger, that makes them think, well, surely that's impossible, is they imagine it as like a random stranger, as in, you know, we'll just pick, we'll pick someone for you out of a hat, and that, that's your, that's your co-founder. And of course, that's not true at all, actually, that the whole point of the framework we use at EF, and that we describe in the book is to take the randomness out of it, like have actual empirical data on how good this relationship is and how likely it is to yield an exciting company. And so I think that's the big distinction, and hopefully that's what we'll get into.

Today's guest is Milad, who is going to be starting her own company at EF in October. She's joining us to find a co-founder and is here today to explore what she should be looking for. Malat, hello.

Hi, how are you?

Yeah, good, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. So Malat, it would be great to know a little bit more about your background and how we can help you get a head start on finding that co-founder.

Yeah, sounds good. Well, thank you so much for having me. Uh, well, I'm originally from Ethiopia, which is in East Africa. I grew up in Ethiopia my whole life. However, I decided to take the leap and come to London to study computer science, 'cause that was my passion. So in 2018, I came to the UK and I studied computer science at Goldsmiths University, and I enjoyed it a lot. So I decided to also do my master's 'cause I enjoyed computer science. And since I loved building, I started— I studied my software systems engineering at UCL, and I'm about to complete it right now. So that's my overall background.

Fantastic. Tell us, what was the moment where you realized I should be a founder? That's going to be the next step in my career?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it was when you see the impact that technology has. And I thought to myself, wow, I could make such a huge impact with technology in Africa, because it's borderless, and it could reach every aspect of the world. And that was, for me, very powerful and very moving, and also very intriguing to see to create something that's so, I guess you could say, impactful for people. And that's what drove me to take the route of starting a company.

Amazing. And that is a very common theme that we hear that, you know, people want to become founders because it's the, it's the way that you can create significant impact, particularly early on in your career.

Exactly. It's fascinating to see how anyone in the world could use a single product and gain some sort of value out of it. And that was I knew that like starting a startup also with the current tools we have, coding and programming is such an easy tool to grasp and quickly create something. So I definitely agree with you. Yeah.

So can you tell us a little bit about how you, how you're thinking about co-founders? You know, I think for some people it's really obvious that to them that they should have one, others are less sure. Maybe they think they should go it alone. What's been your view on that so far?

Yeah. So I've seen people who have who are solo founders and people who have co-founders. And something I learned is that solo founders struggle a lot, basically not in the sense of like technicality. So like business aspects, more of the pressure on them. I see that they have this feeling of they're doing it alone, they're taking this journey alone. And I can tell that that's very pressuring and puts a lot of weight on their shoulders. On the other hand, people with co-founders, I can tell that if they're a good team, becomes easier. And it's like combining 2 forces together. And so, I've always been pro-co-founders instead of a solo founder, but I'm not against being a solo founder. I just think co-founders are easier. The journey becomes a little more easier.

Well, I love your framing of combining 2 forces together, because I think that's exactly what it is. And often what people don't realize is that the power of a co-founder is that it can fundamentally transform what you can create. It can transform the idea, it can transform who you are as a founder. And it really is that coming together of 2 exceptional individuals, where the sum is far greater than the parts.

Exactly.

I think this also touches on one of the really tricky things about co-founders, which I think you're absolutely right that it's really hard without a co-founder, but it's probably even worse with the wrong co-founder. And so I think sometimes people get stuck on this, that maybe they have an experience where they work with someone for too long where actually it's not a fit. They're not being productive, they're not making progress. And instead of thinking, how do I find the right co-founder? What do I learn from this experience? They're like, ah, co-founders are too hard. I'm going to go it alone. Occasionally, clearly, there are successful solo founders in the world. But I think one of the things that we've designed at EF and we really believe in is that going into the process of trying to find a co-founder with the framework of testing rather than like, I'm committing for a decade on day one, is one of the ways you can avoid this problem of overreacting to an initially challenging co-founder experience.

Yeah, I think As you said, there are bad co-founders. I think that's actually one of my biggest concerns is how do you know if someone is the right co-founder? And I guess it's something like, this is something I appreciate about EF, which is the breakup culture is like encouraged. So, if it's not the right co-founder, the pressure of breaking up with that other co-founder is not so much a weight. And actually, that's a question I have for you guys. How do you know if someone is the right co-founder? Like, what are the traits?

I think, in some ways, this is one of our favorite questions to be asked, because there isn't a huge amount of literature out there about this, largely because most of the literature assumes that you've known your co-founder forever, and you already know everything about them. At EF, we are big fans of the idea of strangers coming together as co-founders, but this only works if you go into it with a certain mentality, and this is a testing mentality. Often, when people think about finding a co-founder, they go into it with a commitment mentality, which is great. You do, and you should want to commit to the person that you are co-founding with, once you've been through a testing process. I mean, if you look at the analogy with dating, as in, nobody gets married on day one, you go through a period of testing, and then, then you legally and financially commit to each other for the rest of your lives. What we encourage at EF is that you go into every potential co-founder relationship, understanding that it is a test period, and being explicit about that. So, having that conversation upfront with the individual that you are testing. How we do this at EF is that you get into a team and you set short sprints that might be as short as 48 hours, it might be as long as a week, where you want to achieve something during that time. Now, our big push is that productivity is traction for teams. If a team is productive, it's probably a good team. If a team is not productive, however much you like each other, it's probably not going to work. But the other key bit that you have to have is that explicit moment Where you sit down together and you say, is it working? Do we want to continue? I think the challenge is that often what happens is people spend a lot of time upfront talking, and they spend lots of time talking together about shared ideas, common interests, shared values, shared beliefs, which is all fun and good and useful. But actually, fundamentally, until you've worked with somebody and tried to produce something together, you don't have enough information to make that commitment decision. So, we would sort of flip it on its on its head. Of course, you can talk to your co-founder and go for drinks or whatever, but actually, we would push you to first commit to an idea together, work out what you're going to work on together, have that conversation upfront, and then immediately get working on it and see whether you can be productive together. And if you can, great, keep going, but keep having these evaluation points where you check in with each other about what's working and have that conversation regularly. Are we going to keep going? Are we going to continue? If yes, great. If no, also great, because as you say, Malat, the cost of being with the wrong co-founder is enormous.

Yeah, that's interesting. You know, it's another, I guess, like, thought I usually have is this balance between asking yourself, oh, is that co-founder too perfect? So making it seem like— how could I explain this in a way? So am I being too picky or not picky enough? So a good example would be we're working perfectly, and there's such a balance However, am I being too compromising in certain things? And so when do you know, when can you know this balance between perfection and too much compromising in a co-founder?

I think this is where the testing mindset is really helpful, not just because you're actually testing something relatively measurable, like, you know, progress or productivity, but because it forces you to get out of what I would call the analytical mindset and into the doing mindset. Now, I think both Alice and I are quite analytical people, but one thing that we emphasize a lot in the book is that there is no test you can take. There is no analysis you can do that's going to tell you whether someone is perfect, nearly perfect, 3 quarters of the way perfect. But the good thing is that that question almost doesn't come into it. If you're making progress, one thing I observe from you know like the now you know fifty plus cohorts we've run globally is that the founding teams that work and last they're almost too busy to ask themselves this question in the sense of like if the main thing you're thinking about you know at the end of a day is like is this the right co-founder? They're probably not. If the main thing you end up thinking about at the end of the day is. How are we going to solve this problem? Like, how are we going to access this customer? How are we going to incorporate this customer feedback into what we're doing? That's a really good sign because it's a sign that you're already building together rather than sort of trying to figure out, is this the right person? It's a little bit like, again, with the dating analogy, I think that most relationships don't happen because people are setting a series of stage gates where they're trying to reach some sort of empirical conclusion about the fit. It just becomes clear that you're enjoying the time you spend together. Well, in the startup world with co-founders, the same is like, if you're making progress, you will feel that. And feeling that pull is a really good sign.

Oh, I see. And how about this feeling of, oh, how about if I'm missing out and there is someone out there which has even more of a perfect fit?

I mean, I think it depends on the person. When I look at the thousands of people that have been through Entrepreneur First and the ones that I've worked closely with, Sometimes there are individuals who are so fantastic, they have so many of the founder qualities that we're looking for, but they struggle to commit. And they struggle with the optionality that something like Entrepreneur First provides you, where there's multiple different co-founders that you could commit to. And they see it as an optimization problem. They're basically trying to test as many people as possible, and then compare them, you know, gather that data, then compare them, then choose the best one. And unfortunately, that's just not how human relationships work. You know, your potential roster of co-founders are not going to wait around for you to test out other people to then pick them as the very best one. So, ultimately, there has to be a degree of belief that you have found the optimal co-founder for you. And whoever you co-found with, there will be a variety of compromises. I suppose what I would push you to think about is, one of the things we believe is under-talked about or under-recognized is that the idea that you create will be a function of you and your co-founder. So, actually, as much as it is about testing the co-founder, ultimately, you also have to be really excited about the idea that that co-founder enables you to create. We often refer to Matt and I's story because people are like, oh, you know, why did you guys co-found together? Because our co-founder pairing is actually quite counter to a lot of the EF frameworks that we talk about in How to Be a Founder. But Matt and I could really only create Entrepreneur First. We're both non-technical. By co-founding with Matt, and him by co-founding with me, it really did constrain the type of company that we could create. Now, actually, we're both really, really excited about what that idea was, and we still are 10 years later. But when you're thinking about the sort of perfect co-founder, or have I found the right one, I would encourage you to think about, it's not just the person, it's the idea that working with that person enables you to create. That's probably the other layer that I would throw in.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I never thought of it in that angle. That's very interesting.

It's one of the things we actually talk about a lot in the book is that I think almost one of the dangerous things you can fall into is thinking of, you know, coming up with an idea and picking a co-founder as separate processes. Whereas if you actually think of them as like, the same process intertwined, iterated constantly. Again, I kind of feel like you stop doing this, is this the very best it could be, simply because the pull of the idea draws you on. And that is what is exciting.

Yeah, I guess it's more of a thing where if you're working well together, then asking that question is irrelevant. It's more of keeping Doing that iteration. Makes sense. And let's say there's a situation where me and my co-founder were working very smoothly, and then there arises, like, a conflict, which is very fundamental. How does someone tackle such a challenge?

So conflict within co-founder relationships will always be there. And in some ways, because as a founder, or as co-founders, you're creating something that doesn't exist, Everything's on the table. Every decision is on the table. Every opinion can be put on the table. Having conflict doesn't mean that you shouldn't be co-founders. I remember Matt and I having heated arguments about various parts of what we were going to do in the early days. What I would say, though, is it's how you solve those arguments that matter. So, both how you work through that process together, but also ultimately how you make that final decision. And I think one of the things we often hear is people say, oh, but, you know, the CEO gets to make the final decision. In a company of 2, it's unlikely that the CEO can just put down their foot and say, right, this is how the decision is made. I think one of the things that we push at Entrepreneur First is this concept of strong beliefs, weakly held. So, what you are doing as a set of founders is very quickly coming up with beliefs. They may be right, they may be wrong, but the important thing is that you've made a decision together to pursue a particular hypothesis. Then you need to get it in front of customers. And ultimately, the decision-maker in a situation where there is a sort of conflict-type conversation is the customer. It's going out and speaking to the people who are actually ultimately going to be buying or using your product. So, we see teams that sometimes on the surface look very good and look very productive, but actually, one of the most important measures for a team's productivity is the number of decisions that they're making every week. Yes, there might be some conflict, or there might be some intense debate about getting to that decision. But I would encourage you to look out for the ability to say, cool, we've discussed it, I'm going to disagree and commit, and I'm going to support this particular belief. And then we're going to go out and test it. And we're both going to be open to updating that belief. So, conflict isn't necessarily a negative, it's sort of how you handle that, and how you very quickly push to a decision, and then push to testing that decision.

One thing I'd say as well is, I think, The word conflict has so many negative connotations for most of us. But one of the frameworks that we've used a lot at EF, and I think is really a recurring theme in the book, is if you're going to have big conflict, some conflict is existential. Sometimes you get to a point of conflict where it means you shouldn't be co-founders. The disastrous thing is to wait 3 years to have that conflict. And so actually, the key is not to avoid conflict. The key is to bring forward the likely causes of conflict early so that you can actually make the decision to not work together when the stakes are low. Like when the company isn't worth anything, when there aren't any employees, when there aren't any investors, when there aren't any customers. It's much better to find that you have conflict in week 2 that you kind of ultimately conclude means that you shouldn't work together than to have it in year 3 or 4. Now, again, there's no foolproof way of making sure you never have conflict, but I think sometimes Particularly, I think, you know, for people who are conflict-averse, as I have to say, both Alice and I are instinctively, it's really tempting to lean away from the conflict, sort of COVID it up, say, I can get through this, it will be okay. When actually the tough conversation, the fierce conversation, as we sometimes like to say, that you should be having is exactly the one that says, you know what, maybe this is not the right pairing, because your opportunity cost as a founder is so high. In the right pairing, you could be creating literally like $1 million of value a day. That's, that's what the most valuable EF company so far has done. And so, we would really encourage you not to be afraid of saying, particularly early on, I'm going to be honest with myself, this doesn't feel right. I'm going to lean into the conflict, and I'm going to get out of the wrong pairing.

I would say for our listeners, do check out Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, which is a book all about how to have these kinds of tricky conversations. It is on the howtobeafounder.com website, but it's probably one of the best books out there around how to give feedback, how to have those tricky conversations so they are as effective as possible.

Well, thank you. Yeah, that, that's very interesting. I guess conflict can be beneficial if used correctly. Like, let's take it a step backwards. Let's say that it's like the first day of EF and there's like a list of different cohort members. When selecting someone, would you say it would be better to pick similar passions or skills that complement each other? What would you say would be a way to select someone you think would be more suitable for a co-founder?

So, I'm always wary of the word passion, because you can have many passions with very different depths of knowledge or expertise around them. And one of the mistakes we often see people make is, when coming up with ideas, going after passion areas. So, for example, it might be sport or art or whatever it is, where they don't actually have a real advantage playing in that space. I would love to say that the co-founder process is a tick box exercise, where you can sort of say, right, you know, go after passion or go after skills, whatever it is. In the early days of EF, we actually tried doing this. We wrote out the cohort of people that we were working with, and then we looked at them on paper and we matched them together. And as you can imagine, that did not work at all. One of the things that we have realized, which is sort of, I suppose, the theme of this episode, is that it's only through testing an individual you can truly understand whether you should work together. So it might be that some of the pairings that we produce at EF are actually largely based on having a shared belief about what the future of the world could be. And this is part of our ideation framework that we refer refer to in the book. And actually, it's that shared belief about what the future can become that creates that team. It might be that some of our teams are much more focused on a complementary skill set. I'd say probably for most teams, it's a combination of the two, that you have to have a shared belief that you both are excited about, and you have to have the skills within that team to produce it. But largely, neither of those things are as important as actually committing to testing that team and beginning to get started. So, I mean, we have this framework of, you know, you form a team, you test a team, and then you break up if that's the right thing to do. And so, it's very easy to get stuck in the conversation stage. I would just encourage anyone as they're thinking about finding a co-founder to get to the testing stage as quickly as possible, because it's the only way you can really gather information about whether that is the right person or not.

Yeah, I guess my last question would be, if there's any piece of advice you wish you knew before you started your co-founder Looking for a co-founder, or just even your business, what would it be?

Well, I think there's something about, and this worked out well for us, to be clear, but I think there is something about really going into any co-founding relationship with your eyes open. As in, you're going to have, if you succeed, you're going to end up working together for such a long time, and you're going to end up Actually having this very unusual, quite unique relationship. There's nothing like a romantic relationship or even a friendship. I mean, Alice and I are friends, but there is something about what you're going to get into that is quite hard to describe, but it's going to be extremely intense. And the intensity comes from the fact that very often, for a lot of situations you're going to encounter along the way, your co-founder is going to be the only person who A, really understands, and B, is truly aligned with you financially, emotionally, in a lot of ways. Now, it's not to say that your investors, your team members aren't also aligned with you, but there is something really special about that. And I think one thing that people underestimate is that we often say the co-founder is the most expensive hire you'll ever make. You're giving them half your company. But I think the other thing that I wish I'd known, because it's been so great, is your co-founder will just change you in really profound ways. They'll hopefully make you better at the things that you're already good at, and they'll hopefully help you get better at the things that you're not. And I think going into it, not in a functional sense of like, how do I find the person that will make me succeed? But is this someone that I think I could spend a decade, in our case now more than a decade, building something with and having this, like, very unusual, very, you know, intense professional relationship with, I think, in a way, it's quite liberating, because you stop— it gets you out of, again, that analysis paralysis and gets you into, like, you know, is the momentum we're feeling every day, does it feel like the start of something really big?

Thank you so much for joining us, Milad. Some really, really great questions there. And best of luck finding your co-founder in October.

Thank you so much. That was honestly very, uh, changed the way I think completely. I came in thinking that like, oh, I should ask a co-founder these, these questions in order to know if they're the right fit. But in reality, it's more of testing it out. Does this actually work? Kind of like a product, like you should release it and see how customers react to it. Thank you for having me. Thank you for all the advice you've also given me. Thank you.

So next up, we've got a letter from Vikrant. He's ready to start a company, ready to start being a founder, but he has some questions about how many co-founders to have. Matt, why don't you, why don't you read this week's letter?

Sure. So Vikrant says, dear Matt and Alice, I'm finally taking the leap to found a tech startup. I've spent the last few years working across sales and operations for a shipping company, and I feel like I'm in the sweet spot of knowing the ropes, but being fresh enough to see all the problems. I've got tons of ideas on how technology could optimize the industry, and I'm keen to get going. The trouble is I'm undecided on whether I should go it alone or with others. I'm pretty technical. My degree was in engineering, and I pick up things fast. So I'm confident I could build at least an MVP, that's a minimum viable product, before employing anyone. If I'm being honest, I quite like the idea of going alone. I'm not keen on giving up loads of equity. However, I do recognize that having someone else working with me could really speed things up. If I got someone more technical on board, that opens up a lot more possibilities for what we could build. Or if I got an industry veteran, their connections could help with sales. Is it worth it to get a co-founder? And if it is, how many people should I bring on? Thanks, Vikram. Good questions.

So, this is a set of questions that we see a lot. And I think it's worth saying that you can co-found a company with many different numbers of people. If you look at something like Airbnb, you know, there's multiple founders. If you look at something like Amazon, Single sole founder. At EF, because of our particularly unique and unusual model of encouraging strangers to co-found together, we actually have very strong views around this. And we believe in the power of co-founding duos, you know, meeting your match, meeting your one other potential co-founder. But that is based on this idea that it's about finding a co-founder and developing an idea simultaneously. What we see is, as soon as you start adding more co-founders to that process of both developing a relationship, but also building an idea, the relationship relationship complexity increases significantly, to the point where one of the big challenges I would often see is that you would have maybe, say, 3 people trying to work together. Maybe 2 were very aligned on one facet of the idea, and then a different 2 were very aligned on a different facet of the idea. But actually getting all 3 people at the same time aligned on the same idea, and that it fit with their preferences, skills, backgrounds, and all the rest of it, was usually impossible. And, you know, one of our mantras is that productivity is traction for teams. You know, it's a good team because it's highly productive. Just found that by adding in that co-founder complexity, adding in more than 2 individuals working together, it has rapidly decreased the productivity of the team, which in some ways is counterintuitive.

Yeah, I think the other thing I would touch on here is this, this thing around being a solo founder. And, you know, clearly, there are great solo founders. But I think the thing to really test here is what can you achieve together faster than you might be able to achieve alone? Again, like, We have a bunch of frameworks in the book that talk this through. And the thing we always emphasize, both in the book, but especially during EF, is frameworks are just frameworks. Like, we're not trying to pretend that there is any universal startup advice. But I think one thing that people sometimes underestimate when they decide that they're going to be a solo founder is just how painful that is, not necessarily just in terms of productivity, but in terms of resilience. So we have a long section in the book where we talk about the importance of willpower. In founders. And we'd say that, you know, actually, willpower is ultimately the most important scarce resource that you have in a startup, because if you retain willpower, you can actually survive running out of other resources like money. One thing that I would really encourage Vikrant to think about is whether, you know, as well as thinking about skills, and, you know, he mentioned things like sales, for example, he should also think about the psychology of entrepreneurship. And, you know, we talked, I think, last week about, you know, the sister podcast with Gina Galway. And I think it's really worth having a listen to that. Because actually, you know, running out of willpower, you know, getting to the point where you don't want to carry on is a really common outcome for founders, and probably one that's not discussed enough. And I really believe, and I think you see it very clearly in our experience with now thousands of founders at EF, that having a co-founder is one of the best ways to maintain willpower. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is that, you know, as I said earlier, like, you do have absolute alignment with this person, you know, you Your shares are the same kind of shares. Your identity attachment to the company is likely to be very similar. So the first reason that it's good for willpower is there is just someone that truly understands what you're going through. The second is, one of the nice things is you're typically not, particularly as the company progresses, having the same experience as your co-founder every day. And one of the things I've found really valuable about working with you, Alice, is sometimes on the days where I'm having a really tough time, You know, because of, you know, the things I have to do on that day, you know, you're in different meetings, you're seeing other people, you're working on different things, and you're not going through that. And actually, like, the balancing of the company is not just me, the company is not just my mood cycle, is a really valuable thing. And I think this bit can be a little bit underrated. I think people get very functional and very economic very quickly. But actually, a company that keeps going is definitionally worth infinitely more than one that doesn't.

And I think that's one of the key benefits of The other one I think is often underrecognized is that the quality of the idea that is produced will be better as a function of having a co-founder. So, typically, when you're developing an idea, you are often constrained by what you know how to do and what you know about a market, what you know already exists. We'll talk about this more when we do the podcast on where ideas come from. But we love seeing co-founders come together and the combinatorial innovation that happens because they are having a conversation around, okay, well, I can do this, I can do this, you can do that. What happens if you bring those things together? So, we often find that people often come to EF with ideas, you know, quite strong ideas about what they want to do, but they often discard them very, very quickly because they've met someone who has enlightened them about something, either, you know, a technology that is possible or a market that they may not have known about. And when they think about how they can combine their backgrounds, that's where the real magic happens. So, I would, you know, we've talked about this a little bit already, but there's this very strong belief of ours that you cannot separate out the idea generation process and the team building process. It is simultaneous. It has to be done together in parallel, because the idea is a function of the team. So, I mean, i.e., I suppose my strong belief, pretty strongly held, would be that the ideas that we see coming from co-founding teams just are more interesting, more differentiated, often more defensible than the ideas that we see coming from individuals.

Yeah, and that's why we've landed on a very strong recommendation, at least at EF, that people should be co-founding pairs, teams of 2. It's sort of an interesting sort of trade-off in that I think adding a second person definitely increases the quality of your ideas, as you just said, Alice. Although weirdly, when you add a third, I think that the returns are not only diminishing, but sometimes negative, for a reason that may not be obvious to people, which is that, you know, there's that great Peter Thiel framework that's in Zero to One about the best startup ideas are good ideas that sound like bad ideas. In other words, if your idea is very obvious, it's unlikely to be a great idea. But that does create a real challenge, because it means that everyone in your co-founding team has to agree on a premise that is both hugely ambitious and controversial. Now, that's hard enough with 2 people, but getting 3 people to agree on a genuinely contrarian belief that is also ambitious, that's just really hard. The whole point of being contrarian is to begin with, most people will think it's wrong. And so I think there's a danger that people settle on an idea when they have too many co-founders, because it's a consensus idea that lots of people can get on board with, rather than being the actually most ambitious and contrarian version.

We've covered a huge amount in this episode, but I suppose there are some very clear themes, and these are the themes that we pull out in How to Be a Founder, the book, as well, around the importance, first up, of having a co-founder, and how this can impact your resilience, the quality of the idea that you produce. I think probably, well, I hope one of the main things that everyone's taking away is that, in some ways, how do I find a co-founder is the wrong question. The question should be, how do I test a co-founder? And really baking in that idea of testing into every stage of that co-founder consideration process.

Yeah, although I would say that the, one of the other big themes is this idea of the reason testing is important is because it's so easy to settle for the wrong co-founder if you don't test. And so that's where I think the how do you find bit is important in that I think don't take— I guess like our very strong thesis, given that what we're building at EF is don't take as a fixed set of potential co-founders your existing network. I think maybe you're one of the lucky ones and there really is the perfect person in that group, in which case still test. I mean, testing is clearly the key. That's our deep, deep belief. But if that doesn't work out, don't give up. Think about how to build a network of potential co-founders. Obviously, joining EF is one of those. You know, we do all the work of curating a cohort of people who are smart, are skilled, are ready to go right now. But I think just this idea of not settling is absolutely key.

It might actually be worth touching briefly on, you know, how to build your network. And one of the reasons we hear, particularly from younger individuals, about why they aren't starting up right now is they say, oh, well, I don't have a network. Therefore, I don't have anyone to co-found with, but I also wouldn't know any customers or investors. But that network piece around co-founders is really interesting, because our push would be, you need to think about how you classify what or who your network is. If you know people, you have a network. Now, it just might be that they are your friends, or they might be people that you knew vaguely at university, or worked alongside at an internship, or, you know, were part of your graduate scheme or whatever it may be. But I would encourage you, as you think about finding a co-founder, to be quite deliberate about mapping out your network. We talk about this in the book as well, but really being very specific about who is in your network, and how through those people, you might be able to get access to who is in their network. Because as soon as you think about it like that, actually, you've got a pretty sizable amount of people to work through and to test. I think the challenge can sometimes be when you're looking for somebody who has a very different skillset for you. Either often the kind of stereotype is, you know, how do I find a technical co-founder? But we've worked with enough technologists where the question is also, everyone in my network is deeply, deeply technical. I want to find somebody who's less technical than me. Where do I find that? And this is where network mapping and being like, oh, I thought I didn't know anyone in that space, but actually, I'm one degree away from someone who can help me access a different community, could be super helpful.

Thank you for listening to How to Be a Founder. To take a deeper dive into the topics we discussed today and more, take a look at our book, How to Be a Founder. It's out now and available online and in bookshops. Co-Fruition.