Hi All,
I started a company a few months ago, we are in the video game space. Right now, we've secured investments, built a small team and have been working on the prototype that we will use to shop around to gain some additional investment to work on the product. We're estimating a total of a 4-year production cycle.
We started with me and my friend (the co-founder who has some developer experience) and add an excellent and experienced developer, a very experienced artist and jr artist.
The structure was intended for the cofounder to work as a jr developer under the tutelage of the experienced developer, they would make up the technical team. While the two artists handle art/media creation. My role has been multifaceted, getting funding, gathering the team, managing the meetings/teams/production road map, working with the Art team and working with the developer, along with various other duties. I'm stretched a bit thin.
One major goal we wanted to get out of this was to have the cofounder learn more about development. I have some experience with coding but found I was a better Projectmanager than a Developer, so I've. focused my career on that. The cofounder is the least experienced team member, but he's always been energetic, charming, and really good at selling us to investors... that is until recently.
These last 5 weeks, he's majorly dropped the ball. Missing meetings, not learning/studying, not producing any work, etc. granted he's been busy in his personal life with a wedding coming up, a tragedy hitting close to him and a full-time job, I'm trying to be understanding and I am. BUT his lack of enthusiasm has caused the main experienced developer to express some frustration and is starting to kill his motivation. Without the experienced dev, the project dies for a few months until I can sort out a new one, and likely will need to start from scratch. This is something I do NOT want to do.
I have a talk scheduled with the cofounder to bring this up.
My gut tells me to express my understanding of his situation, but ask that he leaves the project for a few months until he gets his shit together. Maybe for 6 months. At that time, he likely won't have enough value to be a developer, even a jr one, if he's not staying on top of learning and I may struggle to place him in any role other than an assistant.
To be clear, I like him and want to work on this venture for him.
My questions are:
- What would you do in this situation?
- How would you phrase the conversation to him?
- Have any of you dealt with similar things? How did you handle it and what was the end result?
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