Should Your Best Friend Be Your Startup Co-Founder?

brett fox
5 min readFeb 13, 2024

Two of my co-founders were my friends “Ken” and Adolfo. I felt that I was reducing the risk of co-founder failure because I knew Ken and Adolfo so well.

Picture: Depositphotos

I had worked with both Ken and Adolfo for years before they became my co-founders. Yet, Ken didn’t work out as a co-founder and Adolfo did work out as a co-founder.

I’ll explain based on my experience why you shouldn’t have a friend as a co-founder, why you should have a friend as a co-founder, and, most importantly, how you should decide on who your co-founders should be.

Why you shouldn’t have a friend as a co-founder.

As I said, I had known Ken for years before I asked him to be one of my co-founders. We had worked together for years and then we became close friends. Then, our wives became friends. We were so close that we vacationed together.

Ken and I had been talking about starting a company together for years. I thought he would be perfect as our VP Sales because he had tons of experience successfully setting up sales organizations worldwide. It was a huge advantage for us to have Ken from the start because it’s virtually impossible to lure a Sales VP with his experience to join a startup at inception.

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brett fox

I work with startup CEOs to help them grow their businesses . I built several businesses from $0 to >$100M. Learn more at https://www.brettjfox.com