Your capabilities are defined by your specific motivations, traits and skills. Understanding the inventory of your own motivations, traits and skills helps you understand how you behave and make decisions even under the extreme pressures you will encounter as an entrepreneur. Understanding motivations, traits, and skills also enables you to better help teammates be and others successful in their decision making by understanding on their motivations, traits and skills. With this specific set of knowledge you can understand how to act and share decision making in more complimentary and less stressful ways (our session 8 on Relationship Building will expand on this).

Co-founders split when working together becomes intolerable. We have already discussed how co-founders can flourish. Unfortunately, that often does not happen. On the overview page to Session 12 we mentioned the statistic that only 1 in 4 founding teams stay together for more than four years. We can also add that co-founders splitting in the first four years is the biggest cause of startup failure.

Co-founders are a blessing and a curse for fairly obvious reasons. They are GREAT when they share the workload, are equally passionate about the vision of the business and its success, they think in a complimentary fashion, when the understand ‘you’, and when they have a complimentary skill set and personality and when that personality includes an empathetic open-mindedness. And when that co-founder is a friend that can ease the emotional stress associated with founding a business. And when that co-founder is a lover that can add some sexual energy to the business.