Today, it will just be a short post, but it will be about something that I want to write more about in the future – finding a partner for startups. I can definitely say that I do not have a good track record there so I guess my reflections will rather be a reminder that you need to get it right and not some sort of guide as to how to go about. I definitely cannot provide that.
I am writing this post from Los Angeles where I have been for the past 4 months for an exchange semester as part of my master’s degree, and while I am studying I am starting a business, which should really be my main priority – it is what I care about the most. Anyway, I started my master’s program in august ’16 in Copenhagen, and it has been a great experience. I have learned a lot, gotten to know a lot of great people, and I have developed a lot personally.
In December ’16/January ’17, I decided to bring a partner on board. The two of us shared many beliefs and dreams, and we had both decided that entrepreneurship was going to be our path towards creating the future that we envision. In the beginning, it worked rather well. We had many great discussions and ideas on how to go about the business. We come from different backgrounds, and we could compliment each other with different strengths. However, for months we kept on exploring how we were going to initiate the business, and as it turned out, we pivoted more than several times within the first 7 months. By pivoting, I mean we thought up a business model that could work, and then we ditched it because we thought something better could be done. In October, we listed all the business models we had had in mind and came up with 14 distinct paths.
While we had lots of meaningful conversations, in summertime something changed. I don’t know if it was frustration with the pivots and the lack of progress, if it was frustration with each other, or something else, but something had definitely changed. We didn’t have the same spark as we did when we started out, and right around that time, I had to leave for Los Angeles to go study, and my partner stayed back in Copenhagen for a while before joining me in California. This period of separation was not good for us. We barely communicated, and we each had tons of ideas on how to proceed with the business, and when my partner finally arrived in Los Angeles 1½ months later, our thinking had diverged quite a bit, and there was a lot of tension in the partnership.
Sadly, about a week ago we chose to break the partnership off because we just couldn’t make it work. I will get into the details of why that was so from my perspective in a later post, but what I can say for sure is that it was a huge blow to a friendship with a person I cared a lot about. It was also defeating because my track record with partnerships is really not good. I will also explain that in a later post or several, but for now it has left me with a feeling of failure. With that said, the decision to go our respective ways has been right, no doubt about it. I feel way more excited about the startup now than I have been… I guess, ever.
Anyway, I just wanted to jot down some of my thoughts on this process, and I guess a simple key learning here is that you must not take a decision to bring a partner on board lightly. I have learned several other things from this particular partnership, and in part that is a couple of reasons why not to bring a partner in, but that will have to wait until a later post.