How To Be A Co-Founder: The Relationship Gut Check

You don’t have to good at everything, but for goodness sakes be complimentary.

I had the great fortune to be best friends in undergrad with one of the best CTO’s (and people) out there, Tyron Stading. We partnered to build our first company together, StrongBox Security.

Given we were both Computer Science at Stanford, at first we divided the development work equally. As Ty was building services on top of Linux like a boss, I was building the interface at a snail’s pace.

This was the worst feeling I could have — the feeling of not being useful. I would wake up in cold sweats worrying that Ty would call me out not just for being an inadequate programmer, but for being a bad friend. From there, the word would be out that ‘Adam can’t code’ and my career would be over.

Luckily, Ty either held is tongue or more likely was willing to do more of the work in this phase because that’s the person he is. After a week or two of this, I started thinking about what else I could do to help the company move forward. It was then I started exploring the ideas of Market Size, Go To Market and Initial Validating Customers.

I started on working on all the other things not coding related, and the more I dug in the more I learned about the mountain of work it is to build a company that is not coding related.

It turns out when you are talking to prospects or investors, they have no interest in reading your code. They care about what your product can do for them, and why this is a big opportunity.

Fast forward twenty years later, and the original Kahuna pitch deck had exactly one slide around technology out of eight slides. Although not a large part of the content, technology innovation and ability to build were large parts of the discussion, but part of the whole vs. the whole itself.

Now is a great time to start a company, and the biggest decision you will make is who to charge the hill with. For non-tech people, don’t try to overcompensate, just be super freaking useful. For tech people, know you are special (not entitled), but recognize the value of the whole picture.

I would build a list of key skills needed to build a great company, and assign who owns what. In fact, I will probably amend this blog post later to include my version of that list.