Choose Your Cofounders Carefully To Prevent Disaster

The time must be right and the agreement must be airtight

The best way to fire a cofounder is to never take on cofounders in the first place.

I’ll begin with a quick cautionary tale about my friend, “Terence,” and his super promising startup that failed before it even got started, because he got screwed over by one of his cofounders.

Terence is a good dude, like a really good dude, one of those people with whom you instantly feel a kinship . When people talk about Terence, they usually lead off with: “He is such a good guy.”

But don’t mistake his niceness for weakness. Terence is also a really smart guy, with an independent streak, a good deal of risk tolerance, and solid connections. So when Terence wanted to talk to me about his startup, I was excited to hear about it.

His startup was already generating revenue, and was growing from a local play to regional. But the idea was meh. It was something a lot of people were already doing or trying to do. The space was a sudden hot commodity, and at this point, Terence had more of a nice side business than a high-growth startup.

However, Terence had an idea that would dramatically alter the original concept and immediately right all the wrongs…