Jun 6, 2023 · 15m · founders-journal
3 Strategies for Choosing the Right Co-Founder
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In this episode of Founder's Journal, Alex Lieberman explores essential frameworks for selecting, structuring, and maintaining a successful co-founder partnership by blending insights from executive coach Matt Mochari with personal lessons from building Morning Brew.
Statements from this episode (8)
Lieberman: The Great CEO Within should be required reading for entrepreneurs
“It's potentially the best book I've ever read on like a tangible operating system for you have a business, you're at some stage of that business, and you're asking yourself, what do I do to run this business well? This book Is, I think, the best book that answ…”
Lieberman: Give co-founders substantial equity but never split 50/50
“Give your co-founder a lot of equity. And third, don't split your equity, 50, 50.”
Morning Brew Took Two and a Half Years to Generate Revenue
“I don't know if we started Morning Brew after I had graduated, if it would be around today, because it took us basically two and a half years to actually start making any money on the business.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Would Have Failed with Four Co-Founders
“If those two people were still part of Morning Brew, I don't think Morning Brew would have succeeded, and it has nothing to do with these two individuals specifically, but I think the complexity created by having every major decision in a business made by four…”
Lieberman: Only four of Y Combinator's top 100 companies had solo founders
“And then Gary Tan, who's now the CEO of Y Combinator, he said of the top 100 YC funded companies, only four Were solo founders, and those founders were able to create their own MVP on their own.”
Lieberman: Good co-founders beat solo founding, but solo beats bad co-founders
“So to boil Sam and Gary and Matt's view on co-founder, no co-founder, multiple co-founders into kind of one thesis, it's most likely to be successful is having one good co-founder. After that is being a solo founder, and after that is having a bad co-founder.”
Former Clearbit CEO Alex McCaw lost two companies to 50/50 equity splits
“Alex McCaw, who is the former CEO of Clearbit, he's a serial entrepreneur, he's one of Matt's clients, he wrote that the idea of not splitting equity Fifty-fifty is key, and he went on to say two of his previous companies were destroyed by a fifty-fifty split.”