“I just bought a unit in new The Millennium building, up in the City,” my co-founder, “Ken”, said to me. “You should check it out!”
“Really,” I said. “I thought you were going to buy a house on the peninsula, closer to where our future office will be?”
“Nope,” Ken said, laughing. “The Millennium was calling me!”
“Okay,” I said.
At that moment, I wondering how all in Ken was going to be once we became operational. The drive from San Francisco to our office, without traffic, was going to be close to an hour each way. Was Ken really going to make that drive every day?
Rule Number One: You should never start a company with a co-founder that isn’t all in.
Ken and I had known each other for about twenty years before we started our company together. We were friends. Our wives were friends. We vacationed together.
Most importantly, we had worked together. Ken was a known commodity, or at least, I thought he was.
Ken was the best sales manager I had ever worked with. It was a coup to have him as a co-founder because you usually can’t recruit a great sales VP when you’re just starting out.
