How to Choose a Business Co-founder

Stuart Frost
2 min readAug 17, 2020

One of the fundamental issues that cause most startups to fail is insufficient team cohesion. Besides having a robust market-validated notion, it’s essential to select the ideal company co-founder for institutional success. The co-founder will identify the business blind spots and are great companions in startup journeys. Here are five tips that help in picking an enterprise co-founder.

Go Online

Countless websites assist sole-proprietors in meeting like-minded co-founders. CoFounder Lab has an extensive network and hosts in-person matchmaking activities to ensure entrepreneurs find the right support team.

Founder2be houses designers, co-founders, marketers, developers, and others who are searching for the right partners. Other sites include cofound.org, FounderDating, Techcofounder, among others. Co-found.org enables users to search for partners based on specific skills. With

FounderDating, entrepreneurs have to pay a membership fee to interact with co-founders. Technical startups can acquire business partners at Techcofounder.

Search for Complementing Skills

Co-founders should have different strengths and skills from the entrepreneur. For instance, Steve Jobs’s stern guidance has contributed to Apple’s success; however, Apple also required Steve Wosniak’s innovative brilliance to achieve that success. Jobs were the company’s face, and Wosniak concentrated on the technical side.

Define the firm’s core values

When selecting a co-founder, using a well-structured set of core principles is crucial. A firm’s core values will affect its goals, priorities, and decisions. Entrepreneurs should determine whether they are competitive or collaborative. They should avoid dwelling on values such as quality and integrity since they are table stakes. Business owners should concentrate on values that make them diverse.

Discuss How To Handle Adverse Circumstances

Every business and partnership goes through a rough patch at some point. Cash flow decline, workers leaving, fundraising challenges, and patrons terminating contracts occur and strain partnerships. Company owners should implement a strategy for handling tough times for successful partnerships. The most excellent institutional partnerships are successful due to the lows that they survive rather than the revenues they achieve.

Communication is critical

Improper communication between partners is detrimental to a firm. There’s no perfect communication style, but entrepreneurs should ascertain whether they have similar communication styles with prospective co-founders.

Some individuals may prefer one-on-one meetings, but others may like communicating via email or other messaging platforms. Some direct communicators may sound harsh, and others are slow in grasping specific points.

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Stuart Frost

Stuart Frost Laguna Niguel, has 30 years’ experience in founding and leading successful data management and analytics startups.