Dave Kashen discusses why co-founder breakups happen so often in startups. Most founding teams don't stay together through exit or IPO, yet the splits rarely get talked about openly. Early founders often get erased from company history entirely.
I cannot think of a company that I know of that doesn't have a co-founder who was really early, who eventually left, and then that person usually gets erased from history. So no one knows about them, but they exist. And then usually if you have 2 to 3 co-founders, you know, I've almost never seen a company where all 3 last to the end, if you will, like to the exit or to the IPO or, or whatever, that also isn't very common.
It's interesting, it doesn't get talked about a lot. Maybe to your point of like the, the second or third co-founder gets erased in history, but it's— I notice it's, as you're saying it, I'm like, oh yeah, I can think of a lot of examples like that. And it's not a commonly, you know, discussed thing in Silicon Valley and startup communities, um, and which, you know, I think if you are, if if you are a co-founder and you're parting ways with another co-founder or thinking about it, it really is not normalized. So it can feel like, oh my God, what's wrong with me that like I can't make this work with my co-founders. So I'm just appreciating normalizing it a bit that like, it's almost like, you know, almost maybe more intense than a marriage in some ways. Plus there has to be all these other layers of alignment beyond just like the, romantic and sort of life alignment of like how you want to do business and your goals and all that. So it makes sense to me that the odds of you choosing somebody for whom that alignment is totally on and stays on as things evolve are low. Um, and you know, given that 50% of marriages end in divorce, it's not shocking that co-founder marriages, uh, often do too. But it's interesting how I, I don't hear that talked about a lot. Um, yeah, there's so many threads I want to pull on.
