Ben Horowitz on picking cofounders: don't rush out of anxiety, choose people you know and respect like the Beatles did, not an assembled team like the Monkees. He favors 50/50 splits and insists on a single CEO, saying shared command kills decision-making.
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Talk a little bit about selecting co founders and dealing with issues as they arise. Yeah, so there's a few principles. I think the first and most important is when you're founding a company, there's a little anxiety involved. Some of you may have experienced this. You're like, oh my God, what if this doesn't work? How am I doing this? Your guts are boiling, you're feeling very uneasy. And so there's a tendency to like grab the kind of closest co founder you can find to say, oh, okay, it's not just me now, I'm not by myself. Like, that's a big mistake. Right. You don't want to let your anxiety drive your decision. And that's probably the number one most important thing. Beyond that, there is something that John D. Rockefeller said that I have found very useful. He said, I have found that friendships based on business are far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. So just be careful about going business into business with your buddies because, like, that's generally the wrong reason to do it. And then thirdly, and I was talking about, this is going to be a reference that the young people don't get. But there used to be these two bands in the 60s. One was called the Beatles and the other was called the Monkeys. And the Beatles were some guys who knew each other, respected each other, formed a band and became one of the kind of great bands of all times. And the Monkees were a band that was literally put together by the record company. And they said, you and you and you and you, you all look cool together. Like, you have the same haircuts. Like, let's make you a band called the Monkees. And the Monkees were actually pretty successful for a little while, but there was something just like fundamentally inauthentic about them. And so you kind of are generally better off being the Beatles than the Monkeys. With a startup, to really kind of work with people who you know for a while and respect and feel like you can be teammates for a long, long time. And then on founder splits, if you're not willing to equally split the company from an equity standpoint with your founders, that's probably a mistake. Like 90, 10 splits and 7520 splits tend to work less well than 5050 splits. And it just has to do with like, I knew you stuck, that's why I took all the equity. Ben, how does one deal with 5050 splits when you end up with a fundamental disagreement? This is the other thing. Like somebody needs to be the CEO in a company. Will you fund a company where someone's not the clear CEO. I won't. When you choose to share command, why are you sharing command? It's because you can't agree with your co founder who should run the company. But everybody in the company is going to suffer because of that. Because you don't have clear command. And you don't. And decisions have to get made twice.
