[opmelogy]

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear it.

I tried twice to start software companies with people I knew. Both times the other party didn't invest nearly as much time as I was putting in. And in both cases I figured this out fairly early and started to match their drive and investment into what we were building. As you'd expect, the companies folded within a few months.

What's interesting to me is that one of the guys I'm still friends with and the story he tells for why it folded is very different from my view. To him, it was me backing away and causing it fail and from my experience, it was I switched from working on it 7 days a week to working on it two weekends a month. I don't think he's being mean spirited here - I think he is just that clueless about what was going on.

My current start-up was founded differently. My partner and I did multiple smaller projects together to see if we could work together. We also went through a deep dive on "past traumas" (key life defining moments for us) along with exercises on what sorts of values we want to inject into the company (ranging from how we handle feedback, to how we respond to failure, to what our employees would say about us and the company 2 years in the future, etc.). This allowed us to understand where we are coming from, figure out if our values aligned, and help lean on each other when things got hard/stressful. It really does make navigating building something together. Basically "wtf?!" reactions can easily be replaced with "uh oh, is everything okay?"

[CMCDragonkai]

I've found that people live in their own delusions. You have to learn how about how a person perceives the world around them and realise that there is no objective truth but simply what they believe.

Then you can still work with them as long as their incentives are aligned with what you need them to do. That is the intended behaviour fits within their perception.

[taneq]

It sounds to me like the two perceptions of your previous startup are pretty well aligned. You felt your partner was coasting so you checked out. They felt that you checked out. Maybe they were doing more than you realised, or maybe they were just freeloading.

[opmelogy]

> You felt your partner was coasting so you checked out. They felt that you checked out.

Yes that's basically what happened. I get that this is their perception, but find it funny how much self-awareness is lacking as to what they contributed. I'm still friends with them and still like them, but they are firmly in the camp of "nope" moving forward.

> Maybe they were doing more than you realised, or maybe they were just freeloading.

I'd love for it to be the case where they were doing more than I realized, but considering we're all engineers and I'm the only one working on designs and implementing code...and driving all the discussions...you get the idea.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I recently had a similar experience. There was no bad blood in the departure, but what I thought would be more of two people with supplementary experiences coming together ended up feeling more like an employer/employee type of relationship. Like many co-partnerships that end up splitting, one person felt like they were doing all the heavy lifting for too long and that engenders a bit of resentment.