How To Navigate Co-Founder Disputes

Technical skills build startups—but oftentimes, people skills can save them. So how do you navigate the disagreements and conflict that inevitably arise with a co-founder? In this episode of the Lightcone, our hosts share what they've learned for managing these critical, yet often overlooked challenges, offering advice on how to handle the messy realities that go beyond building.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Garry Tan?

  The weirdest thing that sometimes with co-founders happens is if it doesn't go well, then it couldn't be me, it's got to be this other person.

• 0:08Diana Hu?

  It takes two. That's the reality.

• 0:09Harj Taggar?

  You can like even be running a successful company and wake up one day and be like, holy shit, like.

• 0:14Jared Friedman?

  I hate my life. I hate my job. I don't want to do this anymore.

• 0:16Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, right.

• 0:16Jared Friedman?

  Yeah.

• 0:17Diana Hu?

  I think in these relationships that are so intense is where we get so hurt. Don't feel alone if you're going through this. It's actually very normal. I mean, this is why I think YC was special for me, too.

• 0:26Jared Friedman?

  I like almost repressed this memory over the years because it's so embarrassing when I look back on it. Of course, like, it doesn't matter and all that debate only led to a bad outcome anyway.

• 0:43Garry Tan?

  Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. I'm Gary, this is Jared, Harge and Diana, and collectively we funded companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars right when they're just a few people. And today we're going to try something different. We're actually going to talk about co-founders and specifically co-founder conflict. You know, how do you work through that and what that means for your startup and actually for your life?

• 1:09Jared Friedman?

  I feel like when I was starting my company, this is an episode that I would not have listened to because I was like, ah, stupid, like emotional crap. I just want to like write code and like learn about technology. And if someone had like forced me to sit down and listen to an episode like this and really think about this kind of stuff, that would have been the number one most helpful thing in my startup. It's actually the thing that held us back were all people problems. They were all issues like the ones that we're going to talk about.

• 1:39Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, and that sort of makes sense, actually. I mean, what is a company if not people making pretty hard decisions? Hundreds of them a week, maybe tens of thousands over the course of a year. And then these little decisions, you know, might be fraught, might be obvious, but either way, either it's the right decision or the wrong one, and then it compounds. And so when you look at like one of these unicorns or these like Deca Corn companies, you know, frankly, big tech companies that are worth a trillion dollars, those are the Compounded decisions of co-founders and you and your executives. And so it all comes back to the very simple thing, which is people in a room, fighting, not fighting, fighting fairly, not fighting fairly.

• 2:24Garry Tan?

  Maybe we could start with Harge, who famously was one of the co-founders with Patrick Collison of Stripe fame today. What was that like?

• 2:37Harj Taggar?

  Well, it was definitely a long time ago. It was 2007, what, 17, 18, 18 years ago now?

• 2:44Garry Tan?

  How old were you? How old was Patrick?

• 2:46Harj Taggar?

  How old was I? I would have been 21. And I think Patrick would have been 18, I think. The full, the full story in that case

• 3:00Harj Taggar?

  was that I had actually applied to YC in late 2006 with my co-founder, my cousin Corvair. And we were accepted into YC, I think, as the first international team.

• 3:14Garry Tan?

  You're the first international team?

• 3:15Harj Taggar?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Garry Tan?

  Incredible.

• 3:17Harj Taggar?

  I think it was maybe one Canadian team, but that counts. It's gonna be American soon, anyway.

• 3:26Harj Taggar?

  At the time, neither Corvair and I knew how to code or build software or do anything. We'd like hire these Eastern European contractors to build the whole website. And so a condition of being funded, I had side learning PHP and side like taking it over anyway. And so one of the conditions of YC funding us was that like we continued learning to program and, and build stuff. So we were accepted into YC in like winter 2007. I spent most of the time just like learning to code, learning to build software, like building our app and everything.

• 3:57Garry Tan?

  Bozo.

• 3:58Harj Taggar?

  Bozo, yeah. We pivoted into Automattic during the patch, but.

• 4:03Harj Taggar?

  At the end of YC, I knew that we probably still, it would be great to have someone else like working on the software besides me. And Paul Graham, the founder of YC, introduced us to this guy called Patrick.

• 4:18Garry Tan?

  So you were actually also the first co-founder match at YC.

• 4:21Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, actually, not quite. We're really doing this live. I mean, the first one was probably Aaron Schwartz, but.

• 4:27Garry Tan?

  With Reddit, yeah.

• 4:27Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, so it was a similar situation in that Patrick applied with this idea for, hey, like eBay meets Wikipedia. Our startup had pivoted into tools for eBay power sellers. And so PG was like, oh, like, you guys have this idea, you both want to kill eBay, you have this idea for building tools for sellers. This other guy's got this idea for like building a better interface for finding products people want to buy. You guys could use another programmer. He's like, seems like a really great programmer. Why don't you like meet up and see if you want to work together instead of Patrick doing the next batch as a separate company?

• 5:07Harj Taggar?

  And so we, we met up in London at the time. He was in Ireland and we went back from San Francisco because we didn't have visas to live out here. And we just got along really well. And we kind of did like, I guess a shotgun marriage where we're like, hey, like, yeah, this is, we like hanging out, we spend the weekend together, we should totally just like join forces and start the company.

• 5:24Jared Friedman?

  And how'd that go?

• 5:26Harj Taggar?

  Um, isn't like, I mean, I think if I fast forward to the end, we sold the company, we were aquahired within a year. And largely because none of us were really that excited about what we were working on. I don't think either of us had really set out with like, you know, our life's work is to kill eBay. They both, for both of us, it had just been like a project. That's what they just kept going. I think a year into it, we had raised a seed round, we weren't able to raise a series A. We were all sort of a little low on morale. And the aquahire was sort of a really graceful way out. Definitely interesting learnings from that like co-founder experience. And I just think the number one thing is like,

• 6:11Harj Taggar?

  I mean, Patrick wasn't. To a sort of CTO role, like as is very obvious now, like he's sort of an extreme outlier founder and probably one of the greatest CEOs, you know, like probably of our generation. And I think it's hard to be co-founders with a personality like that when they're not the CEO. And I think in general, we see this.

• 6:33Garry Tan?

  You find that out. I found that out about myself, actually.

• 6:36Harj Taggar?

  What did you find out?

• 6:37Garry Tan?

  Oh, my God. I mean, I also started Posturis with my co-founder, thinking, oh, I'm, you know, some of it is like a little, I'm realizing like a little bit cultural. I was reading about how, you know, East Asian cultures just have desire for high social conformity. And, you know, these are things that I didn't really examine. I was just like, oh, I'm just, you know, normal American kid. It's fine. But, uh, deep down, like, actually, yeah, I did not understand something about me, which is I actually do want control. And the control comes from wanting to be able to fix it if it's broken. And I actually think that that is what the CEO actually is signing up for.

• 7:20Garry Tan?

  Is like, if it is broken, it is up to me to fix it. And, uh, you know, if you're that archetype and you're in a role where it is not up to you to fix it because you don't have the authority to actually make all, you know, those decisions when you have to, it just doesn't work out well, right? Like you find yourself in these sort of situations where you know that you want to do X, but, you know, it's not your job, like someone else wants to do Y. And then, you know, what do you do? You could just like live with it, I guess, or you could fight. Or, you know, sometimes you just have to be CEO.

• 7:56Diana Hu?

  So you were the CTO and

• 7:58Garry Tan?

  At Posturis, yeah.

• 7:59Diana Hu?

  At Posturis. And when did you realize that about yourself? And next time you did it, you were the CEO?

• 8:04Garry Tan?

  Oh, honestly, like I burnt out at my startup and that's when I realized it. My startup story is funny because I feel like it was a misapplication of the advice that you often get, or we, you know, frankly, often give. It's like, in order for your startup to be great, you should try to have a great relationship. With your founder and I didn't know what that really meant, actually. I thought it meant get along with each other and, you know, maintain concordance. You know, like if I believe X, but that other person believes Y, like, well, I could change what I think. And let's go with what they say. And that's not a good relationship.

• 8:45Garry Tan?

  That's like lying down, like that is literally self abandonment. And then the weird thing that I just, I did this for a couple of years. In the background, I try also try to be like the hero coder. You know, I take modafinil and, you know, literally work 20 hours a day. And I do, you know, I try to hero design and hero code the whole thing. And then meanwhile, when we would have disagreements about product or what the users wanted. Or, you know, ultimately, when our users sort of flatlined. We had the deepest disagreement was like, well, what do we do from here? And my co-founder wanted to turn it into Google Groups.

• 9:25Garry Tan?

  And I just sort of went along with it, you know, while I thought like, well, I'm the CTO. And, oh, you know, I only, you know, I'm the 40 in the 60 40 split. And I don't know if I want to fight over this, so I just sort of went along with it. And then my body keeps the score, you know? There's this long known book called The Body Keeps the Score that talks about when you don't work trauma out properly. It just like sort of lives in your body and it remembers. And so I actually had like a psychosomatic thing that happened where I couldn't sleep and I couldn't eat. And I couldn't even like bring myself to go to the office. Yeah, I learned the hard way.

• 10:08Garry Tan?

  I mean, luckily, again, like also, you know, the great thing about Silicon Valley is the company. We, my co-founder ended up selling it to Twitter for $20 million. And that was really meaningful for me. And by then, like Harge and Jessica and PG had peeled me off of the ground.

• 10:28Garry Tan?

  Brought me over to Y C. So, I mean, the story ends well and. At the time, funny enough, like I felt like the victim. And then now, like with a lot of hindsight, like 15 years of hindsight, I realized like, I shouldn't have blamed my co-founder. Like, I did all those things. I'm the one who self-abandoned the things that I knew. I'm the one who like didn't say the thing that I knew in my heart. I imagine people are watching and maybe this is resonating for them. They're like, I know this is not going, we're not making the right decisions, we're not going in the right way. My sort of thing for them is, uh, listen to that, right? This is a lot, a lot of this came from like my family upbringing and my situation. My communication style was like the function of

• 11:14Garry Tan?

  my 10,000 hours of, uh, human intelligence training called my childhood. And, you know, I think the more aware you are of what your sort of pre-training is like, the more you can actually prompt yourself to not be like that. And I think that that's something that I've worked really, really hard to change and change that about myself. But, you know, yeah, I, you know, I think the company could have been a 10 times or 100 times better outcome than that $20 million exit if I had figured that out at that right moment when we still could, you know, we were still had the mojo, like, you know, people still knew what we were. You know, we could have done a lot of moves and ended up a little bit more like our friends at Weebly,

• 11:58Garry Tan?

  who did like charge money, turn their very active user base into paying customers. And, uh, I think they sold to Square for like at least 10x what we did. Uh, and then Square stock, of course, went up another a whole lot. So, you know, they, they really did it the right way. I mean, I did this other thing at work also, like I'd take, uh, build up a lot of things. And then at the end of it, I would blow, blow it up. That's a thing that I'm also actively trying to really avoid, you know, 99% of the time. It's like something that I do have control over is, you know, if I don't self-abandon, then I don't like sort of become into this like pressure cooker situation. And then I'm not going to blow up. Like, you know, what I want to do is be authoritative.

• 12:43Garry Tan?

  Like, how do I, you know, see something and say something at the moment that it happens, instead of allowing it to like build up so much?

• 12:52Jared Friedman?

  You have a great line that you often say around here, Gary, about authoritative versus authoritarian. Hey, we can share the principle. I think it's like a, like a deep thing.

• 12:59Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, founders in particular, like they're, your organization will just build up around like how you approach things and how you talk about things and how you think about things. And so, you know, self abandonment is kind of obvious. Like you just, you know, you're getting paid the big bucks. You have equity, like, you know, you are there to render an opinion and, you know, your feelings matter and count. So, you know, self abandonment kind of obviously is bad. And then way over on the other end is sort of being authoritarian, right? So that's not listening to anyone ever, jumping to conclusions. You know, one of the deeper things that I have now learned is that every decision,

• 13:44Garry Tan?

  you know, might be fraught, might not be. You need to give it enough space and time for it to happen. And so for me, I was a conflict avoidant. I wanted everyone to get along. And that desire would sometimes cause me to short circuit all the things I needed to do to get to a good resolution. And so being authoritarian in that case is basically like skipping ahead to the end result. You're like, well, you know, I can't hold this conflict. This is too uncomfortable. Like, I don't like that people think this thing and, you know, I don't agree. So I, I'm just going to like, we're just going to do this, right? And then that's not leadership. That's just, you know, sort of disregarding the people around you.

• 14:28Garry Tan?

  The much better version is actually have a debate. Like, it's good to have a healthy conflict where people, you know, say what's going on. And I regret that, right? Like, going back to my moment with my co-founder Sitchin Agarwal with Posturus. Like, if I could time travel myself back to that moment, there's no reason why we couldn't have. Had that conversation and you know, I didn't need to control the outcome like you know, I didn't really need to be CEO in that moment to have a better outcome than the outcome that came out, right? Like, we could have had that conversation, we could have made that choice together. And you know, because I burnt out, because I couldn't show up to

• 15:09Garry Tan?

  work anymore, I short circuited it and you know, it ended up in self abandonment again. And then if you think about any company that you're running, like, you know, we are operating in these sort of uncertain moments where you know, there's door A and door B. Everyone has different feelings about it. And so the important part is like, can you sit down with the people who you trust and really care about and you know, you have your shared goal and then have like a good faith argument about it and then come to an agreement. And that's like what authoritative to me means.

• 15:46Diana Hu?

  I think a lot of what you're saying, Gary, resonated resonates with my journey too. I think a lot of the journey with a co-founder is so intense because you're going through the high pressure of both of you really wanting to see this company succeed. You're pulling insane hours, you may not be sleeping.

• 16:05Garry Tan?

  That's bad, yeah. People should sleep.

• 16:07Diana Hu?

  People should sleep. And you're also going through all these very intense decisions and maybe up to that point, I didn't have the need to self examine too much. And it's that pressure cooker that I realized patterns about myself that I didn't know. Like you described, same thing, we all have different history, we all come pre-trained with our model with certain default settings. My case, I was also a represent immigrant. And I think the safe thing is not to speak up and it's just not rock the boat, keep things stable, right? So like you, there was things that I would not agree, but I would just not voice

• 16:47Diana Hu?

  them because it was not safe from what I was trained on from my upbringing. And that kind of built that right. And I think it was a process of really, it was a bit of a gift to go into the journey of more self-discovery. I wish I could have resolved things better and it's still a work in progress to be able to sort of speak up. And it's a journey of, I think in these relationships that are so intense is where we get so hurt too. Because we both want it so badly in a different direction. But I think it's also in these same relationships that we eventually heal too.

• 17:27Garry Tan?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Diana Hu?

  Where I think if you make it, we all make it is for the message for everyone is that don't feel alone if you're going through this. It's actually very normal. I mean, this is why I think Y C was special for me too. I could talk to other Y C founders like, oh, I'm not crazy.

• 17:45Diana Hu?

  There's that and feeling that you're not alone. And the other part is like, okay, maybe up to this point before the startup, I was successful. I was, I got by enough with how I operated in this world. But this new level of intensity, it needed to, I needed to gain more control or power over myself and gain more, more of these kind of skills that are new. And it's like a journey of becoming a vertibration for yourself, which was a gift. And that's the thing that if I were to give advice to myself is you're not alone. And it's okay to kind of get more support. And as you talk to your co-founder, conflict will happen.

• 18:29Diana Hu?

  Every relationship is, is normal, right?

• 18:32Garry Tan?

  Diane, do you have a recollection of like a particular conflict? Or was it like strategic or it could be tactical, like things that were just like, well, I believe X. And this other person, you know, who I co-founded this with is believes Y.

• 18:47Diana Hu?

  I mean, in retrospect, I don't think they matter that much. It's kind of the irony when we.

• 18:52Diana Hu?

  Forward 10 years later, it's like, it would have been fine, but it just, they felt so life and death back then.

• 18:57Garry Tan?

  Hmm, that's interesting.

• 18:59Diana Hu?

  Because I'm living there, it's like, I don't know, 4K television version of it. Now in retrospect, little details of how to run the team or that is like, okay, I think it's fine, as long as we get the high level strategic direction right, which I think we did.

• 19:16Diana Hu?

  So it was just being more, more engaging in the debate and being more open.

• 19:20Garry Tan?

  That's a good point. Yeah, any given moment, well, you have your ego, you have yourself, you have like, your concept of yourself, and then all of that is wrapped up into like, your identity, which then merges with the startup. And then the weirdest thing that sometimes with co-founders happens is, if it doesn't go well, then it couldn't be me, it's got to be this other person.

• 19:42Diana Hu?

  It takes two. That's the reality.

• 19:44Garry Tan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Jared Friedman?

  In my startup, we had an equally dysfunctional relationship, but the diametric opposite. So I started my company with a friend from college, and we're both like, American kids who grew up in sort of a classic American household, and we were both probably pretty spoiled by our parents, and probably both pretty used to getting our own way, if I think about our pre-training. And you can imagine how that played out over the summer. We basically fought like cats and dogs on every issue. I remember in particular, speaking of trivial issues, so our company was called Scribd. And Scribd is a terrible name for a startup. No one can pronounce it, no one can spell it. It was like a thorn in our side for like, 20 years. And the reason that we ended up with this horrible name is that we could not agree on what to call the company. We

• 20:30Jared Friedman?

  literally fought about it the entire YC batch. We probably spent tens of hours debating what to call the company. It got so bad, we had to call in Paul Graham to be the dispute because we were unable to launch because we could not agree on what to call the thing we were about to launch. And I like, I like, almost repressed this memory over the years because it's so embarrassing when I look back on it. Of course, like, it doesn't matter, and all that debate only led to a bad outcome anyway. This is... Something that I do see with a lot of the college age founders that we fund, we fund, you know, we were at college age when we started our company. And I've just seen that like a lot of them, just like, you know, like me and my co-founder,

• 21:13Jared Friedman?

  we just had not developed good conflict resolution skills at the time. And so like, we would never do that if we were starting a company again now because we've like, learned how to let the little thing slide. We've learned just like how to, how to solve things like that. But at the time, we just like hadn't learned that yet. And so we would just go around and around in circles.

• 21:31Garry Tan?

  How do people end up learning that? Like, you know, one of the tools that I feel like I had to learn was, uh, it's gonna make me sound so therapy brain, but you know, I actually really like this book called Nonviolent Communication. Because, you know, a lot of the arguments that you're having is like, I have a certain mental worldview of how this is working and this other person has a different one. And then in that context, like Nonviolent Communication talks about how you are totally free to talk about what's going on over here. But if Harge and I are fighting, like, it's not fair for me to speculate or say anything about like his intentions or his motivations. So if I were like, what's a concrete example?

• 22:15Garry Tan?

  It's like, Harge, like, you just think that I suck at vibe coding, don't you?

• 22:19Diana Hu?

  That's a judgment.

• 22:20Garry Tan?

  Yeah. And so that kind of, you know, thing, honestly, like, I mean, whether you're married or like in a co-founder relationship, like, it's very easy to fall into that type of trap.

• 22:31Diana Hu?

  It's just learning to be better humans, right? And a lot of it is, we don't know really what's people's intentions because those are really within them. And sometimes we ourselves are not aware. But what's observable is the behavior, what people do and how you feel. And those are okay things to call. I mean, things that I eventually learned to do with managing people and engineers is not to say, hey, you're a bad engineer. That's just really demotivating for your report, right? Or your co-founder is like, oh, you suck at coding. That's just not helpful. What is helpful is like, hey, I saw you checked in this code and it didn't. Do the QA test and other unit tests, we had agreed.

• 23:14Diana Hu?

  This is something that we can improve on, right? And if you do, then we have to test it less and it's better for everyone. So I think the framework has to do with pointing specific things that people can improve instead of making broad strokes that can almost do a bit of a character assassination, because people may mix things. And part of it is pointing specific behaviors. And then the other thing is giving them a carrot. If you do it and change it, this is how it's good for everyone. That's part of the MVC that makes it a win-win. Shaping a lot of the specific behaviors and things that make it people can act on. And it's less of an attack, right? Because it's nothing about me fundamentally as a person or as an engineer.

• 23:59Diana Hu?

  It's just a thing that I did and sometimes I'm not sure how it happened, but whatever. But let's just get the output to be fixed. However you do it, if you do it, we can win this way. So that's how a lot of what I learned about getting better feedback, which I think is similar framework from the MVC and the Sishtaji-Fili class from Stanford, where they talk about throwing things over the net. Describing the net, you want to describe the net?

• 24:25Harj Taggar?

  I think the idea is it's basically like in any communication, there's like sort of your reality, like all the way you're experiencing it and all the assumptions you're making about what's going on. And then there's the other sides. And like in conflict, it's totally fine for me to talk about everything on my side of the net. Like in the, from the frame of here's like how I'm feeling. Here's kind of like, here's how it feels when you say I'm not a good vibe coder. Like, so I'm all like, this is my area. I can talk about it as much as I want, but I can't go over the net, which is like.

• 24:59Diana Hu?

  You're a bad engineer or something like that.

• 25:00Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, or try and tell you, like try and tell the other person like what they're feeling or what they're thinking. And like, I think it's a real natural human tendency to do that. Like you, you assume that like if Gary says I'm a bad vibe coder, it's because he's like wants to hurt me and he's mad at me or like something like that. And that that's the concept of going over the net is like, I don't know what's going on. And he said, actually, and the only way I can understand it is to like ask him directly versus making lots of assumptions.

• 25:32Diana Hu?

  Yeah, you don't know. The only thing that you can do is the observed thing that maybe that. The code that was shipped with vibe coding did this or that, but not the intention behind it, right? That's the concept over there. Which is overall good communication with anyone, not just for managing, co-founders, significant others, friendships, just to be overall a better human.

• 25:55Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I think you spend so much time with your co-founder or your spouse, honestly, that like you can easily get into this moment where it's like very like one-on-one adversarial. The bad version of this, it just sort of becomes like tit for tat. All of the arguments sort of like bleed over, right? That's like probably a really good tell for some things wrong and maybe you should get, you know, an exec coach in there to help you like work through these things. Cause basically if it's like every conflict is like an everything conflict, you're like, okay, well, whether or not this button is red or blue, like if you if you view that conflict in the context of like all the other conflicts you've had that week, month, or like in your entire life, there's bleed over.

• 26:40Garry Tan?

  And then can you imagine like, how are you going to make a good decision about like whether that button is like red or blue? Like it's, it's not really about whether it's red or blue. It's about like who wins and you know, is there a point system? Like, well, last time you won this time. So, and it's like, at that point, like, hey, what about the mission? Like, what about the thing that we're out here to do? Which is, you know, get users and make something people want? Like, you know, where does this decision fit within that? Or am I just like in an adversarial position with someone else?

• 27:11Harj Taggar?

  The idea of sort of like the pre-training or just like the context, I think is a really interesting one. Like if I think, if I think back to my experiences, first startup, it was like a long, long time ago now. But I actually think so when I think of myself and Patrick and then Kuvir, like in many ways, we actually had similar communication. So we never actually had any like outright major arguments or like shouting matches or anything like that. I think we all actually got along really, really well. And actually anytime we were talking about anything other than the startup, it was great. I still have like very happy memories of that. Like we had like similar intellectual interests and it was just like great. But I think when it came to like the startup, like fundamentally what was just going on is I think

• 27:53Harj Taggar?

  we were at a point where no one was, no one could really be motivated to the max, or I think like do their best work unless they were actually like the CEO and had the final say on things. So I think the way it manifested in that context was just, I don't think any of us were going 110%.

• 28:10Garry Tan?

  Each of you went on to become CEO yourself.

• 28:12Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, exactly. And then like the second time around, I think one thing that I learned was just, yeah, like the, the context that people have or like the cultures they've come up in, both personal and work matter a ton. And they'll give a very concrete example. My co-founders with Triplebyte, my second startup, were early employees at Justin.tv, which later had become Twitch. Justin.tv was notorious for, was known for having a early culture of like extreme aggressive heated debates. And it started with sort of some, two of the co-founders in particular, but

• 28:50Harj Taggar?

  it was just part of the culture was that you would just, like the co-founders would just like shout at each other and scream at each other and like, and that employee, and that was just kind of normal. And so my two co-founders, this was their first job out of college. And so they kind of just thought that it was.

• 29:07Garry Tan?

  If you're not shouting.

• 29:08Harj Taggar?

  That's just how startups work. It's just people like screaming and shouting at each other all the time.

• 29:14Garry Tan?

  It can work. I mean, if it's an opt-in culture, I guess.

• 29:17Harj Taggar?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Jared Friedman?

  I don't know if he was actually shouting. My, my, my mental image of it was more like vigorous debate, like, like debate society debate, not like, not like.

• 29:26Harj Taggar?

  From what I've heard, it was both.

• 29:27Jared Friedman?

  Like Steve Ballmer, like throwing chairs at each other.

• 29:32Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, whatever the details, I think like if you grow up in like, you have like this one type of culture where it's just okay, like outright, extreme aggressive debate is kind of the way you get to the truth and you win. It's not the culture that I can really work particularly well in. I think if I'm in an environment where like there's people like shouting and screaming, I kind of just like, like can't really think clearly. To me, it's like shouting and just kind of like overly heated debate just means you can't think clearly. About stuff and so you're just gonna make bad decisions. And like, I'm not sort of making a judgment on like what's right or wrong, but it's like, if you have like one view of, hey, like this is kind of what this culture means, like, oh, we're gonna make bad decisions. And the other person kind of feels like, oh, well, like, this is the only way you can make good decisions.

• 30:12Harj Taggar?

  Like, that is just gonna constantly create conflict between co-founders, so they don't have like shared context.

• 30:19Diana Hu?

  How did you, when did you figure that out? Because there's a lot of self-examination when you decide to go into a new co-founder relationship.

• 30:25Harj Taggar?

  I mean, I think it was pretty obvious. Well, this was, for me, was an example of just, you can know people in social contexts and then like, the work context is very, very different. So I know, I knew both my triple B co-founders for kind of years before we started the company, but only ever probably more in like, social, low-stress like environments. People are very different in like high-stress environments. And I think this is one of the things we've seen in the batches too, is like, you should generally found a company with people you know, but it's still not like a guarantee that it's gonna work out. Because you might have been like, social friends. And you've only ever hung out like, watching movies and playing chess and doing fun stuff. So you don't know how you're actually gonna react under stress.

• 31:07Jared Friedman?

  How did that play out with Triple Bad Heart?

• 31:09Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, I think it's kind of in high-stress situat-, well, once we were in high-stress situations, which are many in a startup. Yeah, like, I, it was sort of the dynamic would always be, the way my co-founders handle it, I think like would get the best out of themselves is like, aggressive debate. And for me, it's like, I think we should just like, calm down and maybe write out our thoughts, or just like, it's like a totally different. And so just like a total mash of styles. And I think, my way of handling, I mean, it was pretty apparent pretty quickly. I guess my way of handling it was, I should adapt and like, and maybe there's something I can learn from like that culture and the sort of, in general, a lot of my desires to do a startup was like,

• 31:53Harj Taggar?

  personal growth and like wanting to get better. I was like, okay, well, it'd probably be helpful for me if I can like just get better at handling like more aggressive debate. And so, I will just like, sort of mold myself into being able to like, do that and handle it. And I do actually think there was value in that. Like, I certainly like, there is certainly value in me able to like, Handle more aggressive debate and just like a different culture. But I think the way it then played out is like four or five years into the startup. It was actually just a huge tax on me personally. And sort of a part of the reason I kind of burnt out and just decided I wanted to move on and hand over the CEO range was like, uh, like, I'm just like exhausted, like actually for me, kind of like being in this culture and kind of trying to always be like the,

• 32:35Harj Taggar?

  bring it back to the middle or turn the temperature down was just exhausting for me personally.

• 32:40Diana Hu?

  What advice would you give to co-founder relationships that have this? There's all these unknown unknowns that only play out in high strats scenarios. And how do you grow towards each other to make it actually effective for the company and be there in the long run?

• 32:54Garry Tan?

  Yeah, would you have done something differently, knowing what you know now?

• 32:58Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, I wouldn't have adapted. I think that's, yeah, I think like the number one thing is I just wouldn't have, yeah, I would not have tried to adapt, actually. I would have like forced the other.

• 33:07Garry Tan?

  Maybe a little bit.

• 33:09Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, okay, maybe there's a little bit amount of where it's like, it's helpful. But yeah, I think in general, if you're the CEO, it's kind of like, you kind of have to like intentionally shape the culture to get the best out of yourself. And again, maybe we all have different upbringings, but there's sort of like this, I think you put it like the servant leadership model, which I think is very natural for like me and other founders I've spoken to. And that's like, oh, like you have to sacrifice yourself for the greater good, which is the org. And so you have to kind of like mold yourself into what the org needs. And yeah, I think that is.

• 33:40Diana Hu?

  And there's an asterisk.

• 33:41Harj Taggar?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Garry Tan?

  There are limits to that.

• 33:43Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:44Garry Tan?

  I think we've all found various forms of that limit ourselves personally.

• 33:48Harj Taggar?

  And again, I think, I mean, I think this is basically a lot of the founder mode to, that has obviously caught off. And it's sort of caught off in like the late stage context. But I think it actually is this like underlying thread is a journey that lots of founders go through and not just in co-founder context. But it's like, you start the company, you kind of mold yourself into whatever you need for like the company and the org to succeed. And you can like even be running a successful company and wake up one day and be like, holy shit, like.

• 34:14Jared Friedman?

  I hate my life. I hate my job. I don't want to do this anymore.

• 34:16Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, right.

• 34:16Jared Friedman?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Harj Taggar?

  And very specifically, it's like you ended up in a culture you don't enjoy working in. About it in the co-founder context, which is if you adapt, if you and your co-founder have totally different like frames of reference and ways of getting the best out of yourselves.

• 34:29Garry Tan?

  That's gonna be hard.

• 34:30Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, it's gonna be hard. But then if you, if you're like a public company and you hire a bunch of execs and the execs all have like totally different ways and they like become the dominant frame, then you're like basically in the same spot where you're like trapped. You're the founder, but you feel trapped. And I think a lot of the founder mode just captures that energy of actually like you have to stop adapting yourself at some point and make the org adapt to you to get the best out of you.

• 34:53Diana Hu?

  I think that's was very well said. I think part of the journey is that which for a lot of foundering teams, I think they should really get a lot of help outside of the company as well. I do think founders should probably get at some point like a coach, a therapist to examine a lot of these things, because a lot of these are kind of brewing in the background and you don't even know how to articulate it, how to put it into words, what framework to use. To even know that you're going through this transition, this is happening, this is what is needed of me at this point. And you kind of need this partner, outside partner to hold a mirror for you to know that, hey, Harsh, you're going through this.

• 35:29Diana Hu?

  It was fine to mold yourself, the company got to this point, but you gotta make home for yourself to be able to live in it for a long run for a company, because the founder is the one that's gonna stay. So what are the things that you need to keep changing? And it's a, as founders, it's a very tough position to be in. You have to keep reinventing.

• 35:47Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, I agree with that. Therapy, therapy definitely helped me introspect on a lot of this stuff. I think if I had started therapy sooner, I would probably, yeah, I would have stopped adapting myself much sooner.

• 35:57Diana Hu?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I wish I did it just because like I started the company and I'm like, I'm normal, I'm fine. Like, I'm just like everyone else. Like, I have no problems. And it turns out like that was not correct.

• 36:06Jared Friedman?

  So guys, I could imagine there could be some people who are listening to this and they're thinking to themselves, wow, this co-founder shit seems like really hard and like a lot of work. Like, screw that. Like, I'm just gonna not have a co-founder, so I don't have to deal with all this bullshit. What would you say? Like, no, I mean, like, I'm kidding, but like, I'm also serious.

• 36:25Garry Tan?

  Oh, it's totally serious, yeah.

• 36:26Jared Friedman?

  Like, I actually think a lot of people feel that way. What would you say to those people?

• 36:31Garry Tan?

  I think the uncomfortable thing to say that I think is true is only the truly superlative founders end up making products and services that are superlative. Like it or not, in order to create something of great value like that,

• 36:50Garry Tan?

  game recognizes game. So when people, like, when someone is truly, like, recognizably good as an engineer, or as a designer, or as a product person, or as a CEO, or a salesperson, or whatever, it gets easier to find a co-founder because other people are like, that's the person who is like, the best person I've ever worked with. The act of starting a company is like getting into a rowboat. And it's like, we're gonna row out in the middle of the sea and we're gonna find, like, you know, the island of gold, right? And it's like, do you want the other people in that rowboat to be the most capable people who are like, super fierce and like, you know, never say no? Or do you want them to be, okay? And so I, you know, you know, we've been talking about a lot of the psychological parts of it,

• 37:35Garry Tan?

  but a co-founder, you know, is a little bit of a test. Like, are you yourself like someone who someone else would say, hey, like, that person's the best at that thing, and like, let's go do this thing? Like, game recognizes game, like attracts like. And some of it is like, man, if someone's having a really hard time finding a co-founder, the advice might actually be like, you're not at the edge of human capability yet. And, you know, that's okay, like, you know, some of it is like, find a way to get there. Because then you will find the other people who are, you know, sort of rolling in that direction. And you'll just look to the left or right.

• 38:16Garry Tan?

  And it's like, you guys will recognize each other, and then you'll be able to create something really great. But, I mean, the other, the other reason to have co-founders that, like- I think just bears out is like a bad co-founder is definitely worse than being solo. But the best possible world is like having someone who is alongside you, who is mega gets you. And when you're having a bad, the worst day, you know, and everyone does like, you know, ideally your co-founder is there to just pull you up and like likewise. And you can go way farther for way longer and create way more awesome things with people who, you know, hey, they're your people. Startups that work are so rare, you sort of need it all.

• 38:59Garry Tan?

  Like you kind of need like every possible advantage you can get.

• 39:04Harj Taggar?

  Yeah, going for no co-founder is just sort of a limiting downside type optimization. And that's just like not the right way to think about startups. Yeah, to your point. I guess you will have less stress in theory if you don't have a co-founder. But then, yeah, the truly exceptional breakout companies have a really great, healthy co-founder relationship. Yeah, to say, I mean, it's a variant of the like, why do people raise VC funding argument? Where it's like, you don't have to raise VC funding, like you just like grow. You could grow like within your revenues, for example. It's like you totally could. But yeah, you have to kind of, you have to play to win. And actually, like, the way to win is to attract all the resources. It's like get the capital to get the best people to win the market and be dominant and take it all.

• 39:48Garry Tan?

  Yeah, if you don't play to win, someone else is going to play to win and guess who's going to win?

• 39:51Harj Taggar?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Garry Tan?

  I think Harj and I like texted this to each other once. It's, you know, if you don't want to have people problems, then, you know, you need to live on an island totally alone with no one.

• 40:01Harj Taggar?

  This is, this is the Rene Adler philosophy. It's basically just like all problems are actually like people problems and interpersonal problems. And that if you want to have no problems, then yeah, like go live alone on an island. And you have like theoretically no problems.

• 40:23Harj Taggar?

  But yeah, if you actually want to live any form of like fulfilling life, you have to, you need to be part of a society and a group of people. And you have to work through the problems and get good at dealing with them and get good at handling. Handling conflict and and working with other people if you want to achieve anything.

• 40:40Garry Tan?

  I mean, all the things we've been talking about, like, you know, I mean, I think we've been pretty vulnerable and talked about like some pretty painful things, but that's the fun a little bit. Like, that is literally the work. Like, Alan Watts has this saying where it's like, a lot of people in modern society run around and they're just trying to get to the end. They're like, oh, my God, like, let me get to all the way to the end. Like, you know, do I need to get done with this? Right? And then that's sort of like going to a symphony and just like, instead of the concert playing out, they just play the crescendo at the end. That's it. Everyone files in. It just goes like, and then that's it. You're done. And it's like, no, that's not, you know, like, the the journey is actually

• 41:21Garry Tan?

  the fun part, like, the act of being, you know, not going over the net. Like, you can't learn to play tennis and not go over the net if you have no one on the other side of this. And so, yeah, I mean, whether it's co-founders or in your, you know, relationships, I don't know, it feels like all the same lessons a little bit. And this is one game that is actually worth playing. With that, we'll see you guys next time on The Light Cone.