Dear Private Equity / Venture Capitalist folks,
I’m sure you are familiar with stories of co-founder fallouts in the many instances you’ve encountered among your portfolio companies. Especially those of you who invest in early stage startups.
“Co-founder conflict is so common that it’s responsible for 65% of startup failures”, according to research from Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman.
Some classic profiles:
- founders who need to build a team and hire team players but can’t trust others enough to lean on them, creating lack of autonomy and poor morale
- founders who believe that the only way to get performance is to compete, and can’t get their heads around “collaboration”, creating unhelpful workplace politics and dynamics
- founders who overdepend on “key people” based on personal lenses, failing to see and harness other talent and resources within the team, creating poor appreciation and high talent turnover
- co-founders with different appetites for risk and trust, unable to meet eye to eye on key decisions
All these can be trigger points for co-founders to disagree and break up over.
“Personality differences” don’t have to be a problem if the personalities involved are equipped with deep self-awareness, have access to emotional management skills, and tools to help them see their own triggers, response patterns and unconscious sabotages.
What if there’s a way to DE-RISK your investment, that no one has ever told you about, because they didn’t know?
Deep innerwork is one effective way you can mitigate the risk of co-founder conflict and prevent your invested companies from imploding.
It’s the solution you’ve been looking for but haven’t yet found because you didn’t think to look in the spaces of healing and transformation.
DM me if you’d like to discuss getting these interventions into your portfolio management and risk management strategy.
Here’s what a leadership elevation program journey could look like for your founders: Lightbearers: “Realize, Refine, Revitalize”
