My nightmarish co-founder experience
I once started a company with a legit narcissist. And no, I am not exaggerating.
Everywhere you see these days, you hear about great co-founders, working perfectly in-sync with each other. But that’s not the entire reality. Co-founders have differences of opinions, disparate working styles and other personal factors that could hamper their relationship with each other and hopefully they’re able to resolve the issues or end their partnership.
But not if one of the co-founders is insecure and has malicious intent in her heart. Here are a few lessons I learned from this horrifying, nightmarish experience -
- Don’t ignore early red flags. In this case, she and I came up with the idea together. We started working on it. I was the tech team and she was handling sales. But when it came to equity split, for some reason she thought that I should only get 20% equity and she would keep the rest 80%. Somehow, after A LOT of negotiating where I practically told her that it won’t work for me and I left, she agreed that I should get an equal equity split. All of my mentors, friends and experienced founders told me to be very careful of who I was getting into business with because this was not normal co-founder behavior especially at this stage of a startup. But I ignored it. I was too eager to start something of my own. Rookie mistake.
Lesson learnt — Don’t ignore greed.
2. When she learnt that I was having health problems, she told me to step down as a co-founder and go into an “advisory” role. Her reasoning was — “you won’t be able to give 12 hours a day to the company. You need a mental and physical break”. This is when I had consistently been working for 18 hours everyday for the past 10 months on building the product and managing a team of interns.
Lesson learnt — don’t ignore lack of empathy
3. She would routinely talk extremely disrespectfully to me in meetings with interns and other people if I disagreed with her on something. This went on for 2 months, after which I finally confronted her and told her to treat me like a co-founder and be respectful of my effort and the time and energy I put into building the product. At this confrontation, she went ahead and blocked my access to the shared code workspace, downloaded all the data and blocked me from all financial accounts so I don’t get access to any revenue.
Lesson learnt — Don’t ignore psychotic behavior
After all of this, I am truly glad that this happened to me in the early stages of building a company. Even though I didn’t get anything out of the hard work and time I put into building something (10 months of work down the drain and she didn’t share any revenue with me), I am really thankful to the universe for finally getting me out of that toxic co-founder mess.
I am sharing this not to dwell on the negativity but in the hope that it resonates with someone navigating the early stages of building a company.
You can always find good engineers or sales people. It’s very hard to find good human beings. Prioritize that over everything else.
