You know why you started a company. Does your cofounder?
When everything's stuck, it always comes back to what drives you.
A couple can fight about vacations, money, or the in-laws and still find their way back to each other, as long as they share the same values. When it's the values that diverge, there's nothing left to meet in the middle on. You can always negotiate issue by issue, but every compromise is held together with duct tape.
It's the same between cofounders, except we talk less about values than about drive: the deep reason each of you got into this, the one that still gets you out of bed when the company hits a rough patch.
In the partnerships I've come across, I keep seeing the same script. The disagreement starts over something concrete: a feature, a price, a hire, a fundraise, a salary. You talk it through, each side makes its case, out come the numbers, the roadmap, a beautiful Notion page. And when none of it works, it's usually because the topic was just a pretext. The real sticking point is what each of you came into this for. Your drive is the ground you fall back on when you can't agree on anything else. Provided it's shared, or at least known to both of you. Otherwise, there's nowhere left to meet.
The question nobody asks
Of everything cofounders discuss, drive comes in dead last. People happily talk vision, product, market, cap table, and can burn a whole evening on the color of the logo. Much more rarely on what pushes each of them to do this. The question feels personal, a little nosy between coworkers, and plenty of people have never really asked it of themselves.
There's nothing mysterious about drive, though. Research on founder identity sketches out a few broad families, and in the field you almost always find the same ones: the freedom to live life on your own terms, money and the security it brings, a mission bigger than the company, wanting to be useful to specific people, needing to prove something, or just the joy of building. Everyone runs on a mix, and none is better than another. Wanting to make a good living is just as respectable as wanting to change the world, and a lot easier to measure. Trouble starts when you don't know your own, or your cofounder's.
For a long time I believed every entrepreneur shared mine: freedom. A rock-solid conviction, based on a sample size of one (me). In my first meetings with potential cofounders, I was really looking for people like me, and reading their answers through my own reasons. It cost me time.
A disagreement that simmered for months
I worked with two cofounders who had started a company to support people going through a long, grueling course of treatment. Both genuinely believed in the mission. But one was there almost entirely for it, with no real business instinct, while the other, just as committed to the cause, wanted first and foremost to build a company that worked, paid her, and turned a profit. A company, in other words, not a nonprofit.
For months, nothing surfaced. Then it was time to price their offers. The first experienced every cent charged to patients as a betrayal of the mission. For the second, fair prices were the only way to keep the mission alive. They were talking about the same price without talking about the same thing.
Something else was hiding underneath. They'd raised a little money without ever discussing whether to start paying themselves soon. One could go a while without income. The other couldn't. What gets filed under the “money” drive is sometimes less about ambition than about each person's situation. Since it never made it onto the table, the disagreement kept simmering, until one of them left.
Neither was in the wrong. Both were competent and acting in good faith. Their drives, never spelled out, simply ended up answering a question nobody had asked.
The drive you won't admit to
There's an even trickier case: when you're kidding yourself about your own drive. I see it often, especially at impact companies, where the mission is the mandatory storyline. To be fair, the “why us” slide in a pitch deck rarely mentions ego.
So you champion the mission, sometimes sincerely, while what actually keeps you going is the need to prove something, to yourself or to the market. Nothing gets said, but it all ends up showing. Decisions tilt toward what looks impressive from the outside rather than what the company needs. You drift away from customers. And your cofounder senses a gap without being able to put a name to it.
Whoever is living that gap often can't see it, and their cofounder can't force them to. But if you talked openly about drive at the start, at least you have the vocabulary to raise it before your decisions drift apart.
Unicorn, camel, or bootstrapped
The kind of company you want to build is the visible tip of your drive. There are three broad paths. The unicorn aims to dominate its market and is willing to raise a lot to move fast. The camel raises when it's useful but keeps control of its cash and the ability to survive on its own. The bootstrapped company grows at the pace of its customers.
Plenty of teams still start out with a unicorn in mind, because that's the story the ecosystem tells, and “profitable 12-person small business” rarely makes the tech headlines. Then they rewrite their story along the way, rarely by choice: reality eventually catches up with the pitch. Nothing wrong with that in itself. It becomes a problem when both cofounders were aiming for a unicorn for different reasons, and find out when it's time to pivot that they're picturing two completely different fallback companies.
Raising money isn't neutral, either. Money raised is meant to be spent, and fast: a fund watching its money sit in your bank account doesn't feel like it's doing its job. Aaron Harris, then a partner at Y Combinator, admits as much: even while preaching frugality, investors sometimes push their startups to spend more, faster, because time and uncertainty can pull their interests away from the founders'. And raising doesn't protect you from anything. According to a ScaleX Invest study of French startups past their Series A, 70% of those that went under had raised money in the previous three years, and failures often hit around three years after a round. Money doesn't replace alignment. It accelerates you in whatever direction you're already headed, wall included.
This is where drive resurfaces. A cofounder driven by freedom will see every new investor as a loss of control, while the one who needs to prove something will experience the round as a win. Both can answer “unicorn” on the same day, for opposite reasons. When the next round comes up, their disagreement won't have much to do with the amount.
Different drives work, as long as you know them
Nothing says you have to run on the same engine. Some combinations grind more than others, especially when one person's drive runs head-on into the other's. But two different drives can also complement each other, one watching over the mission while the other watches over profitability, and that's often what lets a company last.
The point is to know and understand your cofounder's drive. You're not there to judge it or change it, but to know how to restart the conversation when everything else is stuck. A cofounder driven by the mission won't be talked into raising prices by a margin spreadsheet. She might be, though, by seeing what profitability will let you offer patients two years from now. A cofounder driven by freedom won't sign a term sheet for a nice valuation. You'll have to show him the room to maneuver it buys him, or drop it. Knowing your cofounder's drive means knowing what to lean on, and how to talk to them when nothing is obvious anymore.
Drive can also change. Over a lifetime, obviously. Over the life of a company, it's less certain, but a milestone like getting past zero to one, a new baby, or real burnout can shift it. A tune-up every now and then never hurt anyone.
Nobody gets divorced over the dishes
Nobody really gets divorced over the dishes. And nobody really splits with a cofounder over a price, a salary, or a funding round. Those are just where the disagreement becomes visible, rarely where it starts.
You don't pick a cofounder because they share your drive, and that would be an impossible bar anyway. But you can choose to talk about it early, when nothing's at stake yet, when you can still say things without them turning into ammunition. It's not the most comfortable conversation, or the most natural one. It's probably the one that will spare you all the others.
Try this together
10 min“What would you refuse, even if it were good for the company?”
A funding round, an acquisition offer, a client, a pivot, a salary that's too low for too long: be specific.
- 1Each of you writes down your answer separately, without comparing notes.
- 2Swap answers.
- 3If they contradict each other, that's good news, in a way: you've found the conversation to have now, while no real decision is on the line.
