Alice Bentinck

And so if you don't have a deep relationship previously, introducing a third person radically increases the communication overhead, the alignment overhead.

And that's particularly true if you're trying to develop an idea together.

If one person has an idea and is building a team around them, that can work.

But if you're trying to co-create an idea, it's very, very hard.

The other thing I would push on is the most expensive decision you'll ever make is having a co-founder because they're going to take, you know, 50% of your company.

Well, it depends what your view is on that person.

As in like, do you see that person as somebody who is going to co-create this company with you for the next 10 years?

If yes, the fact that you've been working on it for two months before them or had, you know, a year's more work experience is not going to justify that extra 20% that you get.

But you know, it's so expensive to have a co-founder that adding a third co-founder, whenever we see somebody adding a third co-founder, the question we always ask is, couldn't they be a first employee?

Like you're looking at a radically different level of equity compensation for a co-founder versus a first employee.

And so my push is always like, is it actually worth the cost?

And it's amazing how when you actually put it like that, often people don't believe that's the case.

The reason people often end up in threes is they just don't want to have a hard conversation.

There's a hard conversation where they know that one person is probably superfluous and they're just trying to be nice.

And as a founder of a company, one of the things you'll learn very quickly is that much of the work you have to do is going to be hard conversations with people, hard conversations with team members, with investors, whatever it may be.

And so actually, you know,

Flexing that muscle from the start and making sure you set yourself up for success with the right number of co-founders is a good way to start.

If you if you speak to, you know, first time founders or I suppose even second time founders and get them to reflect on what has been hardest, it'll often be people related stuff.

You know, either it's the wrong co-founder or wrong early hires or they hired their friend or their brother or their lover and then had to have a really difficult conversation when it wasn't working out.

And the common theme is everyone has those conversations too late.