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by kevinbracken
4401 days ago
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He became very skilled at making excuses, and saying he needed to "step back and strategize more." And it always kind of looked like he was working, but in reality he was producing 0 lines of code. That's when I brought on my current cofounder, who revealed that when he tried to work with cofounder 1, he got pushback, aggression, and eventually discovered from Github commits that he was doing literally nothing but living in our house for free and driving our car. |
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For what it's worth, that sounds very anxiety-driven to me, and the response of a relatively young developer. From a tech cofounder, some tips for next time:
Structure the work so that there is frequent, visible progress. At my last startup, the work was broken down into lumps that were at most a few days in size. Modest, regular accomplishment makes progress transparent to you, and smooths out the emotional roller coaster for you cofounder.
Be present. My last cofounder and I spent most of our time within easy speaking distance. Later, as we hired more engineers, we kept him close to all the engineers. Whenever we had a product question, we just had to turn our heads to ask. The easier you make communication, the more you'll get.
When there are issues, explicitly bring up both process and emotion as needed. The reason I became a developer was that it let me hide away in my parents' basement and not talk to people. That was great for coding skills, but not so great for knowing how to work with others or to understand my emotions. E.g., in this case you might have said, "Hey, I know that getting funding is really putting pressure on us. Honestly, it scares the hell out of me sometimes. So let's break the next few months work down into micro-deliverables. That way you'll always have something clear to work on, and I don't have to worry that things aren't making progress."
Depending on circumstance, it can also be worth bringing in a business coach or therapist to help sort out these things.