Ben Horowitz shares 4 principles for choosing a cofounder

The first and most important principle is to not let anxiety drive your decision. Ben recalls the feeling when you first start a startup:

“You’re like, ‘Oh my god, what if this doesn’t work?’… Your guts are boiling, you’re feeling very uneasy. And so there’s a tendency to grab the closest cofounder you can find to say, ‘Okay it’s not just me now. Whew!’ That’s a big mistake.”

Ben’s second principle for choosing a cofounder comes from John D. Rockefeller who said:

“A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.”

Ben advises founders to be careful about going into business with your friends. Friendship is generally bad reason to choose someone as a cofounder.

The third principle Ben argues for is to work with people you’ve known for a while and truly respect. This is how The Beetles were formed, and they went on to be one of the greatest bands of all time. Ben juxtaposes with The Monkees who were put together by the record company:

“The Monkees were actually pretty successful for a little while but there was something just fundamentally inauthentic about them… You are generally better off being The Beatles than The Monkees. Work with people who you’ve known for a while, respect, and feel like you can be teammates with for a long, long time.”

The last point Ben makes is about equity splits:

“If you’re not willing to equally split the company from an equity standpoint with your founders, that’s probably a mistake.”

You also have to decide who is going to be CEO. Ben generally will not fund startups without a clear CEO:

“When you choose to share command, it’s because you can’t agree with your cofounder who should run the company. But everybody in the company is going to suffer because of that — you don’t have clear command and decisions have to get made twice.”

Full video: Startup Grind “The Hard Things | Mark Suster (Upfront Ventures) & Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz)@ Startup Grind“ (Feb 2014)

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