The Co-Founder Conversation Most Founding Teams Never Have
Start small, stay honest, and build the structures that hold as you grow.
I write for founders and executives navigating the inner game of scaling. Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.
Inspired by my recent conversation with Anyi and Andrea, co-founders of Koi Studios, a product design studio working with startups and established companies across tech, sustainability, and consumer products.
Think about something you’ve been waiting to start until the conditions were right.
What would it look like to start with small steps forward? Sit with this for a moment.
The Belief Worth Challenging
There is a version of starting a company that looks nothing like the stories we tell about it. No launch moment. No polished deck. No certainty that it’s going to work. Just a conversation, a small task, and then another one.
Most founders imagine starting differently than this. They wait for the conditions to be right, for the plan to be solid, for the fear to subside. These conditions rarely arrive on schedule. The fear rarely fully subsides. And the founders who build something real tend to be the ones who started before they were ready and built readiness through the process of going.
And alongside that, most co-founders wait too long to build the infrastructure that keeps a partnership healthy. They focus on the product, the clients, the revenue. The relationship that holds all of it together gets what’s left over, which is usually not much.
Both of these are the same mistake in different forms: mistaking readiness for a prerequisite rather than treating it as something you build by starting.
Anyi and Andrea didn’t wait. And the practice they built to sustain what they started is one of the most deliberate things I’ve heard a founding team describe.
What It Actually Looks Like
Anyi and Andrea are co-founders of Koi Studios, a product design studio working with startups and established companies. They met as colleagues at the same company, working on the same project, before either of them had a business.
The decision to start together happened over dinner at a Korean restaurant in San Francisco, at a conference they’d been sent to together. They ordered a deconstructed ramen. They talked about their aspirations. Anyi said she wanted to start her own business. Andrea said the same. And then, as Anyi described it, they were just like: well, should we do this together then?
“It’s almost like that was the courage we needed to actually just start, just over dinner. And then after that, we went back to work and just started doing smaller tasks one by one.”
There was no elaborate plan. No grand launch. After the dinner, Anyi would complete one small task and tell Andrea. Andrea would file a form and tell Anyi. One thing at a time, until it started feeling real.
Their first client came in two to three weeks. They saw an investor posting about a company that needed design support. They commented on the post, sent a direct message, put together a website in two days, and that was it. Their second client came from their network, someone who had seen them posting on LinkedIn.
Neither of them had a polished portfolio when they started. Anyi had built hers by working on fake products and asking friends if they had ideas she could design around. Andrea had put together fake projects over a few days, skipping classes to do it. Both of them knew enough to start, not enough to feel ready, and they started anyway.
“We didn’t know how feasible it was to hit these revenue goals. So it was almost like: let’s see what happens.”
What they built alongside the business was something most co-founders skip entirely. At the end of every quarter, they do what they call a quarterly wrap. Just the two of them. The conversation isn’t about metrics or pipeline. It’s about something harder: how did this quarter actually feel? What do they want more of, and less of? Does working on this business still align with their personal goals? What emotions came up, and what does that mean for what comes next?
Andrea described why it matters: when you’re executing, you’re moving from one thing to the next. Without a structured moment to stop and ask the honest questions, those questions don’t get asked. And when they don’t get asked, they don’t disappear. They just surface later, at higher stakes, with less room to work through them.
If this resonates, forward it to a founder who is waiting to start, or a co-founder who is waiting to have the honest conversation.
From the Coaching Room
The pattern I see most consistently in founding teams is not conflict. It’s drift.
Two people who started with aligned values and a shared vision, gradually moving in different directions without either of them noticing until the gap is too large to close quietly. The goals shift. The motivations shift. What feels like enough changes for one person before it changes for the other. And because nobody built in a regular moment to ask the honest questions, the drift goes unexamined until it becomes a fracture.
The quarterly wrap that Anyi and Andrea described is not a retreat or a formal review. It’s a structured permission to be honest with each other about how it’s actually going, not just the business, but the experience of building it together. That distinction matters more than most co-founders realize until they need it.
The infrastructure for honest conversation is not something you build when things go wrong. It’s something you build at the beginning, so things go wrong less often and less badly.
What the Research Actually Shows
Co-founder conflict is the leading cause of high-potential startup failure
Noam Wasserman spent nearly a decade studying more than 10,000 founders across hundreds of companies for his book The Founder’s Dilemma, published by Princeton University Press in 2012. His central finding is one of the most cited in entrepreneurship research: 65% of high-potential startups fail as a result of conflict among co-founders.
What makes this finding striking is not the number itself but what drives it. The conflicts Wasserman identified were rarely about the business. They were about the things that never got discussed before the company started: who is really in charge when decisions get contested, how equity reflects contribution when roles evolve, what happens when one founder’s vision for the company diverges from another’s. These weren’t surprises that appeared from nowhere. They were assumptions that had never been tested, sitting quietly beneath the surface until the pressure of building a real company forced them up.
Wasserman’s conclusion is direct: the founding team relationship is not a soft dimension of company building. It is a structural one. The companies that failed because of co-founder conflict didn’t fail because the founders were incompatible. Most of them failed because the relationship never got the same deliberate attention as the product or the business model. The infrastructure for honest conversation was never built, so when the honest conversations became necessary, there was no established way to have them.¹
Nearly half of founding teams end in a forced buyout
A 2024 study published in Harvard Business Review by Howell, Gray, and Sackett examined why co-founder partnerships fail and what distinguishes the ones that last. Their headline finding is stark: up to 43% of startup founders are ultimately forced to buy out their co-founder due to interpersonal rifts and power struggles.
The research identified a specific dynamic that makes co-founder misalignment so common and so hard to catch early. Lead founders* and co-founders typically approach the partnership search with fundamentally different priorities. Lead founders evaluate potential partners primarily on skillset and execution: what gaps will this person fill? Co-founders, by contrast, tend to prioritize interpersonal compatibility: is this someone I want to work with? Neither of these orientations is wrong, but when they are never made explicit, the partnership starts with a foundational misalignment about what the relationship is actually for. One person is thinking about what needs to get done. The other is thinking about who they want to do it with. When those two things diverge under pressure, and they usually do, the gap surfaces as conflict.
What the research points toward is less about choosing the right co-founder and more about building the right practices once you have one. The founding teams that sustain themselves longest tend to be the ones that made their assumptions visible early and maintained a regular practice of checking whether those assumptions were still true. Not because they were more compatible, but because they were more deliberate about staying that way.²
Starting Before You’re Ready and Staying Honest After
Two things that are harder than they sound, and more important than most founders treat them.
Lower the threshold for beginning.
Anyi and Andrea started with small tasks taken one at a time. Their first client came from a comment on a post. None of it was polished or planned. What made it work was that they reduced the cost of starting to as close to zero as possible, so the only thing stopping them was their own hesitation rather than any genuine external barrier. Most founders are waiting for conditions that will never fully arrive. The question worth asking is not whether you are ready, but what the smallest possible first step is. That step is usually available right now.
Build the honest conversation into the calendar before you need it.
Anyi and Andrea’s quarterly wrap works because it is scheduled, not optional, and not triggered by a problem. It happens at the end of every quarter regardless of how things are going. That structure matters because the honest conversations are hardest to have exactly when they are most needed: when things are stressful, when there is a lot at stake, when one or both people are already managing more than they should be. By making the conversation a recurring practice rather than a response to difficulty, they ensure the difficult things get surfaced before they become crises.
Separate business performance from partnership health.
The quarterly wrap Anyi described is explicitly not a business review. The questions are about emotions, alignment, and personal goals, not metrics or pipeline. That separation is intentional and important. When the only conversations a founding team has are about the business, the relationship only surfaces as a topic when something goes wrong. Keeping a regular, dedicated space for the partnership means the relationship gets tended to before it needs to be repaired.
Make the implicit explicit early.
Much of what breaks co-founder relationships was never made explicit in the first place: what success looks like, what the non-negotiables are, how decisions get made, what each person needs to feel like the partnership is working. Anyi and Andrea started by talking honestly about what they wanted. That conversation at dinner was not a formal co-founder agreement, but it was the beginning of a practice of asking the honest questions out loud rather than assuming alignment that had never been tested. The founding teams that sustain themselves longest tend to be the ones that made those assumptions visible early, before the stakes made honesty harder.
The Bigger Picture
Anyi said something near the end of our conversation that stayed with me. She described how her personal goal was never to fit the mold of what a corporate person should feel or think. She found performance reviews disorienting, she was never good at adjusting herself based on other people’s standards, and she didn’t want to be. Starting Koi Studios was not just a business decision. It was a decision about the kind of life she wanted to build and the kind of person she wanted to become through the building of it.
Andrea said something similar. She was fatigued by corporate culture, by caring about things that the structure didn’t reward, by the external factors that got in the way of doing work that actually mattered to her. The business was a response to that fatigue, and a bet that something better was possible.
What they built together was not just a studio. It was a structure for working the way they actually wanted to work, with someone they actually wanted to work with, on projects they actually cared about. The quarterly wrap is part of that structure. So is the willingness to start before they were ready and figure out the rest as they went.
“It just became serious. And then I quit my job. And we started getting clients. And that was the moment where we felt like, okay, this is actually going to become something.”
That moment doesn’t come from waiting until everything is in place. It comes from starting with what you have, staying honest with the people you’re building with, and building the structures that keep the partnership and the person intact as the company grows underneath you.
Founder Circle
The honest conversations are easier when you’re not having them alone.
The founding teams that sustain themselves longest aren’t the ones who avoid difficulty. They’re the ones who built a regular practice of facing it together, with peers who understand what it actually costs.
I work with a small group of founders who want three things:
Clarity on what’s actually holding them back. Not just the tactical gaps.
A space to work through the hard decisions, including the ones about how to show up in the world.
A peer group that gets it: founders doing the inner work alongside the operational work.
Our next circle meets soon. Grab your spot here:
If you’re interested in the founder circle or 1:1 executive coaching and want to learn more, schedule a call with me to see if this is a good fit for you.
P.S. Tell me: what have you been waiting to start, or what honest conversation have you been putting off? I read every response.
If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:
¹ Wasserman, N. The Founder’s Dilemma, Princeton University Press, 2012. Research drawn from a study of more than 10,000 founders finding that 65% of high-potential startups fail as a result of co-founder conflict, most commonly over roles, equity, and unspoken expectations.
² Howell, T., Gray, S., & Sackett, E. “Why Cofounder Partnerships Fail and How to Make Them Last,” Harvard Business Review, June 2024. Research finding that up to 43% of startup founders are ultimately forced to buy out their co-founder due to interpersonal rifts and power struggles, driven in part by misaligned priorities in how lead founders and co-founders evaluate partnership fit from the start.
*A lead founder is the person who originated the idea and initiated the company.
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