Ask HN: How do you deal with your co-founder when making decisions?

2 pointscreepy1y ago2 comments

We started a startup 8 months ago and have gained good traction. We are both tech founders with 50/50 equity, but I handle most of the technical side while my co-founder focuses more on marketing using his connections, as well as doing a smaller portion of the coding. I also come up with more ideas, but most of the time my co-founder is pessimistic about them. Our market does not have much competition. We offer cheaper packages than our competitors. While our competitor sells 5 items for $10, we sell 1 item for $2 (we also have 2 more plans that offer more items for a lower price). Recently, I came up with the idea of bulk pricing like our competitor since we provide more value than they do. However, my co-founder argues that our pricing is our advantage. I showed him many videos from YC and others explaining why this is not the case, but he doesn't watch them and believes that we are different, and what works for others doesn't necessarily work for us. We don't have defined roles like CTO or CEO since there are only two of us on the team. How do normal successful startups make decisions? Should we designate a CEO role? Even if we do, we would still argue about who should be the CEO. Please share your opinions and suggestions about our situation. Thanks.

2 comments

r_thambapillai1y ago

1.You should definitely just have the argument and decide who is the CEO. Yes, it will be challenging. But understanding who actually makes the final decision about what now will at least let you avoid 100 small arguments. A good CEO will make most of these sorts of decisions in a way that in the end, if they turn out to be bad, you can change course or roll it back. If you can't even agree to try an experimental idea... good luck.

2. Agree roles, responsibilities and expectations, and areas of ownership. If you have good traction and he is responsible for driving growth in the market, it sounds like he is doing reasonably well and should probably stay in charge of making the final decision on growth for now. But do you guys have targets or growth goals in mind? If you do, and you're hitting them... just take the win and move on. If you're not hitting your growth goals then that should be enough for you guys to agree to try something different, whether that's experimenting with different pricing, marketing, product etc. Either way, having areas of the business that you can both exercise some agency / decision making over will make you both feel better. And combining that with concrete targets will give you an objective yardstick to measure whether the existing strategies are working.

elawler241y ago

Agreed, you should make a decision on who is the CEO. Eventually this will become clear anyways, so just deal with the awkward situation now. When (if) you go out to raise money, the CEO should be the person doing outreach, pitching the vision, and closing deals - that might clarify who wants to take on the role.

Separately - it sounds like you're having trouble aligning and moving forward. Slapping on a CEO title won't resolve that. You'll have to get comfortable with conflict and a bias for action. The pricing question might not matter unless you have PMF - but your relationship could decline if you can't discuss and move forward without resentment.

A few things that might be helpful to read - (1) Radical Candor by Kim Scott, (2) Stripe's operating principles handbook.

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