Lessons Learned

Here’s a fun example. I started RedOctane with my brother, Kai. Pros: We've known each other our whole lives. I know how he thinks before I even ask. I trust him 100%. Cons: We acted like we were brothers growing up. We fought and argued a lot. I don't think we realized that it was terrible for our employees to see us disagree and fight. They don't want to upset one brother, so they would just avoid the work if they saw that we disagreed. Be aware of how you and your co-founders affect your team.

Having a sibling as a co-founder is one of the hardest things to go through. Having a sibling as a co-founder is also one of the easiest things to go through. The challenge we had was that we treated our business relationship similar to our family relationship. Once we understood this issue we changed our behavior and things got a lot better for the entire company. I also worked with remote co-founders (one co-founder was remote) and this was too challenging.  The remote co-founder can feel “left out” and it’s hard to have critical discussions that happen throughout the day when a co-founder is not around to provide input.

Starting Orbit Baby with my wife would probably be the more dramatic and interesting story. I think what made it work is that we had some good boundaries and rules. For example, we figured a rule of not talking about the business during or after dinner. We also tried to carve out different business responsibilities. Actually it was a good lesson in general - we had to respect those boundaries to keep our personal relationship working, but through that I learned a valuable lesson that if you’re really building something with people, you really need to learnt to trust them and let them do their thing. If they don’t do it, then that’s a different problem. But it’s such a common problem for leaders to want to micro manage, and because it definitely does not work to attempt to micro manage your wife, you end up realizing that it’s a good lesson in how to work with your cofounders in general.