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How Do You Deal With Co-Founder Issues When You’re Fundraising?
Every time I raised money, there was drama with one of my co-founders. It’s a nightmare because you’re worried the drama could cost you your funding.
Since at least 50% of all co-founder relationships end up in failure, you have a pretty good chance of having co-founder issues happen when you’re raising money.
Why you’re likely to have co-founder issues when you raise funding?
Let me start with a quick story. When we were raising our initial funding, after we received and signed a term sheet for $12 million, two of my co-founders, “Randy” and “Ken”, demanded that I form an Office of the President.
Randy and Ken wanted every key company decision to be decided by the three of us. Agreeing to their terms would, in my opinion, slow our decision making to a crawl.
Randy, the ringleader of the group, said they might quit if I didn’t agree to their terms.
The threat was clear. Do what we want. or we’ll cost the company its funding. I’ll tell you what I did later in this post.
Two years later, when we were raising our next round of funding, “Tommy”, our VP Sales, decided to quit, again right after we received a term sheet. Tommy’s goal was to see if…
