Stop Looking for a Co-founder, Do This Instead. The Story Of How I Found My Co-Founder

Most people think finding a co-founder is about the search, about pitching somebody on your business, the perfect person at the right moment. Here's my advice: stop looking. I know that sounds like the wrong thing to say at the start of an episode about how to find one, but stay with me. The people who go looking almost always get it wrong because they treat it as a hiring decision, and it's something completely different than hiring a team member. I knew my co-founder for years. Before I saw what was right in front of me. She was a colleague, she was a friend, and eventually the woman I married. This is the story of how I learned the difference between finding a co-founder and recognizing one, and exactly what you should exactly be looking for. Before I dive in, I just wanna let you know that today's topic, today's episode comes from a question from one of our listeners, Craig. Craig, this one's for you. If you wanna submit a question for a future Q&A Wednesday episode, go ahead to 100mba.net/q. I pick the best ones and I answer them right here on the show. So go ahead and do that now if you've got a question. Nicole and I didn't meet as entrepreneurs. Actually, we met when we were in our jobs. We were in education together. I was the chair of the department at the university where we both worked. Nicole was one of the teachers in my department. So I knew her as a professional before anything else. I saw how she worked. I saw how she handled pressure. I saw how she showed up. She was reliable. She was precise. She was creative. She did it all with no drama. Who's very detail-oriented in a way that I frankly am not. And that's the key here. A great co-founder is someone who complements your skills, is everything you are not. You don't want somebody that's like you. You are already you. The company doesn't need two of you. Okay. I'm sharing this story today because I wanted to let you know that I respected Nicole professionally before we had a personal relationship. And that is huge actually, because a lot of people, they try to make it work when it comes to working with family. Well, I actually saw her as a professional before I saw her as a partner in life. And this is really important, especially when it comes to co-founders, because you are going to be partners in this business and you need to have respect. Respect comes first, not friendship, not history, not the fact that you love spending time with each other. This could be your best buddy from high school. You want to have professional respect for each other. Why? Because there's going to be moments where you're going to have to just respect their opinion and go and believe in what they say. And if you don't respect what they're about professionally, then it's going to be very hard for you to actually work symbiotically, to work together towards your goals. So ask yourself a few questions, questions like, can I trust this person to deliver? Do I admire how they show up and work? Do they bring something to the table I genuinely don't have? With Nicole, the answers to all these questions was yes. Before we even talked about building anything together, I knew what she stood for professionally. The next thing I want to share is something that people don't talk about enough, and that's timing. Not just your timing, their timing. Nicole and I ended up at the same crossroads at the same moment. So the timing worked. We both resigned from our teaching careers around the same time. Both of us were questioning what was next for us in our life. What was the next chapter? Both were willing to walk away from security in our jobs to find something more meaningful for us professionally and personally. Nicole wanted to get into film and she enrolled into New York Film Academy. I moved to New York to start an agency, uh, building websites for other businesses. And when we were both pursuing our separate paths, we were supporting each other and trying to help each other win. I can't tell you how many times I was a sound guy on the sets of her films and her projects. I was a slate guy. I'm the one who said action. Uh, I helped negotiate some deals. Because I had a bit of business experience and Nicole helped me tremendously. She brought her creative eye to the video work I was doing for clients. We were functioning as a team before we even called it a team or if we were co-founders. And that matters. When you want somebody else to win as much as you want to win, that is a good sign that there's a good relationship here, that you can actually benefit each other because co-founders who work well together almost always have a period of informal collaboration where they're actually helping each other and working together without any kind of formal contract or agreement or even a handshake. And this is critical because it gives you a chance to see each other in real conditions, under pressure, in the grind. You could actually see what it's like to work with this person when they're under the gun, when they're stressed out. Without that, it's going to be very hard for you to evaluate if you're going to work out as co-founders. Our early collaboration gave me a preview of what exactly what Nicole was like to work with when things got hard. And the honest truth was I learned that she was everything I needed, not only in the moment, but in the future. When I had the idea for the $100 MBA and when it came together, I immediately thought of Nicole, not because she was my partner in life, but because she was the right person for this collaboration. The Hunter Army was going to be very much video-based. A lot of videos are going to get produced, high-quality videos. And we wanted to make sure that we stood above and beyond everybody else when we launched back in 2013. Nicole was a trained videographer with experience and she had a filmmaker's eye. I'm not that, right? I have ideas. I have energy. I have the ability to talk about business in a way that connects with people sometimes, you know, I hope, I hope I can. But aesthetically, in terms of production quality, the patience to make something look and feel exactly right, that was Nicole's superpower, not mine. And here's the other thing I understood. Nicole was new to business. She was learning what entrepreneurship looked like at the same time as the audience we were building it for, which meant she could be their voice. She could tell me, no, that's a little bit complicated. Simplify a little bit. I didn't understand that. That unfiltered, honest feedback from inside the company was the exact perspective that we needed, the perspective of the audience. At the time, Nicole and I were living in New York City. We're living in the Village. No, we didn't have a lot of money. We were living in a studio apartment. Basically, it was like a dungeon apartment on top of Mamoun's Falafel. So the place smelled like falafel the whole time. Nicole was burning incense 24/7, but there was a lot to do around New York. So a lot of times we would walk to Washington Square Park, which was just a few steps away. And we went to the park and I said to her, I think we could build something amazing together. I think we can make a really good team. And I don't know if Nicole remembers this, but I explained it through basketball, through a basketball metaphor. And I know Nicole's not like the hugest basketball fan, but she understands basketball cuz she's around me. And I said to her, think about what makes a great basketball team. You don't build a roster full of point guards, people that handle the basketball and distribute and pass. Point guards can dribble, they can create, and sometimes they can shoot too, right? But they also need people to rebound on the team. They need people to defend, need people who can do the things that point guards don't do. The best teams win because everyone covers what someone else can't. The truth is, is that the Chicago Bulls are not a team full of Michael Jordans. Michael Jordan, yes. Greatest player of all time, amazing, but he can't win on his own. And it was proven because in his early— in his career, he was losing and losing and losing. But like some of the best Chicago Bulls teams with Michael Jordan have some great complementary players like Scottie Pippen, who's known as one of the best defenders of all time, like Dennis Rodman, who gets all the rebounds. He doesn't really score at all, but he gets a lot of rebounds. Somebody like a Steve Kerr, who is like a 3-point specialist, Right? You don't need all Jordans. By the way, if you're enjoying this episode, make sure you subscribe to this show because I'm working on an upcoming episode where Nicole and I sit down and discuss what it's like to open a local studio office and hire a local team here in Sydney. We're going to sit down and have a really honest conversation about what we were learning in the process. Some of the things that we share, I'm sure are going to surprise you because they surprised me when I learned them. So hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Especially if you're thinking about hiring and how to make a great hire. Now we have to talk about the most misunderstood part about finding a co-founder. Most people are looking for someone like them. Like I talked about, they look for the same energy. They look for people that have the same vision, the same way of thinking. And I understand that instinct. It's comfortable. It's easy. Decisions feel simpler when you just agree on everything. But when you have two similar people, you're really not adding much to the company. You have a lot of blind spots. And I touched on this earlier, but I want to make this very practical so you understand. I am an action taker. I like to move fast. I like to launch things before they're perfect, and I like to improve them as they're out in the world. That's valuable at the start of any business, any project, any new product. Very valuable. But it also breaks things and it's not sustainable for the long run. Enter Nicole. Nicole is the correction to that. She's deliberate. She's detail-oriented. She has an aesthetic that's committed to quality that I don't naturally have. She slows me down when I need slowing down. She catches, uh, what I miss along the way. And I'm good at getting it out there in the world and gets the ball rolling and everybody's kind of excited about it. But now we gotta refine and now we gotta make this thing world-class. And that's where Nicole steps in and she kind of lets me do my thing, but then she's like, hey, now it's time for me to do my thing. And the business is better for both of us because of this, not because my instincts are wrong or her instincts are wrong. It's because we complement each other in a way that makes sense for the business. That's what you want with a co-founder. You don't want a mirror. You want a complement. You want somebody that is going to do the things that you can't do. I'm going to give you a very simple example. Right now we're building out our studio office here in Sydney and Nicole loves the process of fitting out the studio, of sourcing furniture, of finding out how we're gonna soundproof this. What is it gonna look like? What's the aesthetic? What artwork are we gonna use? This is her jam. She gets excited about this and she's very good at it. I'm not good at this. Okay. I'm actually somebody who just wants to get to the result. Uh, the process itself is kind of tedious for me. I don't enjoy it. She does. So it's, a good idea to have people on your team, especially a co-founder that enjoys the things that you don't enjoy so that they're motivated to do it. So when you're evaluating a potential co-founder, here's a framework I would use. Number 1, do you respect how they work? Not whether you like them, whether you respect how they work. Can they be counted on? Do they deliver? Do they hold themselves to a standard that you respect? Question number 2. Do they cover your weaknesses? Be honest about what you are weak at. Does this person shore up those things? If your list of weaknesses and their list of strengths don't overlap significantly, you need to think of a different co-founder. That's just the bottom line. You need somebody who's the yin to your yang, right? You want somebody who is going to make sure that you are covered in all directions, because you do this area and she or he does this area. Number 3, timing. Are they at the right moment in their life? A great person at the wrong moment is the wrong co-founder. And I've seen this over and over in my career. I've had teammates that I wanted to like elevate to C-level and give them equity in my company. And I really wanted to have it because they're a great, great team member and they add so much value. But the timing is wrong. It wasn't right for them. They're not looking for that right now in their life. You need someone who is genuinely motivated because the timing is right for them and it's right for you. You want somebody that's absolutely all in because building a business is hard enough. You don't need half-committed people, okay? It's nearly impossible to do this when you're half-committed, right? When somebody who's responsible for an area in the business is just not fully there. So make sure the timing is right and they're motivated to make this work. Number 4, have you actually worked together? Don't commit to someone and give them, you know, equity and make them a co-founder until you've worked with them and you've seen them in action, seen them under pressure, seen them when they're stressed. If you haven't seen somebody in a crisis, you really haven't seen them in their true colors. And I'm not saying that everybody's exposed in a crisis and everybody looks ridiculous. No, you get to see how they handle drama and you need to see that so that you can understand. That's the future of working with them. And it's not just drama between you and them. It's drama in the business, drama with employees, drama with the company and the customers, whatever it might be. The point here is, is that you need to expect that you will have problems. You will have hectic moments in your business. It's going to happen. It's not if, it's when. You need a co-founder that is a ride or die, that is going to handle it with grace. And you're not going to know this until you work with them. You need real data from real situations with real stakes, right? How do they handle pressure? How do they handle disagreements? How do they handle problems with no obvious solution? This is where you need to see them in. Okay. And this could just be a contracted agreement where they work at a high level in your company. They're a manager, maybe they're managing some members of your team, and you could see them in action as you work with them. Don't find out who they really are after you sign the papers. Now we gotta mention some things that you need to avoid. 3 signs someone is the wrong co-founder. Number 1, you're choosing them because you're low Lonely. Okay. I've seen a lot of founders do this. They don't like building alone. It's isolating. They really desire a partner in this journey. But loneliness is not a criteria. Okay. That's a reason to find a peer group or a mentor or be part of a mastermind, not a co-founder. You could pay to solve that problem. Okay. Number 2, you're choosing them for their network and not their money. I've seen this over and over. They're like, oh, this person's Rolodex is huge. They're going to open so many doors. I'm going to make them my CMO. We're going to make them— head of marketing, they're going to blow up our company with the contacts they have. If your primary reason for making this person your co-founder is to have access to the Rolodex, that's a transaction. Transactions dressed up as partnerships create enormous problems, enormous problems the moment they stop feeling mutual. And I'm telling you right now that in my experience, whether that is a team member I hire or somebody I collaborate with, If I'm trying to knock into or trying to get some access to their Rolodex, to their contacts, to their people that they know, I'm often disappointed. I'm often realizing that they are not as connected as I thought they were. And those relationships are not that deep and they didn't open the doors I was hoping for. So trust me, that's not worth having a co-founder. Number 3, your values are misaligned. Listen, we talked about this. Your skills can be different. We actually are encouraging this, right? But values cannot be in conflict. How you treat customers, how you treat the team, what success actually matters to you and them. Listen, when you team up with a co-founder, this is a big deal. They're going to take a part of the company. They're going to take, whether it's 50%, 20%, 30%, whatever it might be, that's a piece of the pie. And that Piece could be worth millions, sometimes billions. Okay. Do not take that lightly. Do not take that lightly. When you're choosing a co-founder, make sure that you're giving that piece of the pie to somebody who's actually going to make more pie, not somebody that maybe you think is going to work out. But once you sign on that dotted line, it's just like a marriage. You are indebted to this person for the long run. Listen, Nicole and I have advantages and we knew each other before we built anything together and we had shared timing. And the foundation was a foundation of real trust. And not everybody has that. I recognize that I got lucky and I'm very fortunate in that area. And I'm not saying that that's the only way to find a great co-founder is to, you know, find somebody that you also marry. But the qualities that made Nicole right for me, the professional respect, the complementary skills, the aligned timing, the real work history together where I got to see her in action. Those things matter. That doesn't change the fact that that was good criteria to base my decision on. Now, listen, your co-founder doesn't have to already be in your life. They might be. But if you want to find interesting people, discover interesting people that might be a potential co-founder, you have to get out there. Okay? You can't just sit in your office or in your home or in your living room. You have to go to networking events. You have to go to conferences. I've talked about this Tirelessly. You have to increase the surface area of you getting lucky. Okay? You're not going to get lucky by just your surface area being the square footage of your home. You need to get out there in the world and meet new people and get connected because you'll get introduced to other people and get invited to other events. And that's going to increase your likelihood of finding somebody that will work perfectly for you. I asked Nicole to build something with me in that moment in Washington Square Park in New York. I gave that basketball analogy. Thankfully didn't go over our head, uh, is not the most polished pitch in the world. It was literally, we're laying on the grass and we just had an honest conversation and we built something real together. Not only the $100 MBA, but we've built Webinar Ninja, our software company together that was a tremendous success. And when we sold in 2024, we had an incredible exit. All these stories came from just an honest conversation. All these experiences, all these wins, all these moments of pure pride and just happy that we actually went on this journey together because we just got frank about this is what I'm good at, this is what you're good at. Let's team up. And hopefully by me sharing my journey and what I learned throughout that journey will help you in your journey. Now, if you want to learn more about hiring and why I've always tend to hire more women in my business, then you want to check out an episode I recently published called Why I've Always Hired More Women. I can almost guarantee that you're going to be incredibly surprised by what I share in that episode because it surprised me when I discovered them and, uh, when I learned them in the process of hiring more women. Go ahead and check it out and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.