I'm a first time founder, working on a SaaS startup as CTO/Algorithms along with my co-founder for the past 8 months. Prior to this startup, I've worked in corporate for the past 15 years in different roles. My co-founder is the CEO and taking care of fundraising, strategy and growth. We work well together and enjoy working with each other. But when we disagree, I feel like we diverge and disagree in a very unhealthy manner.
In spite of coming up with a strategy and a plan of action together, my co-founder has a number of unconscious biases and assumptions that make him veer off and focus on tangential and sometimes seemingly trivial matters (like whether our website needs to have just google sign-in or both google and facebook sign-in). For the simple issues, I simply end up saying "ok. let's do it your way. I don't mind - we can test it later anyways". For more important matters like business model discussions, revenue streams, roadmap and strategy, it gets a bit harder. If the "veering off" and tangential thinking is not caught and immediately confronted, then over the weeks, his strategy and focus diverge massively from what we discussed and agreed upon. For example he began acquiring customers using a different revenue model than what we had previously discussed and building the product for.
Initially I was fine for him to try different things from what we agreed on, conscious that during the early startup days, nothing is rigid. After a month or two, I realised that he doesn't veer off consciously - it's usually one or more hidden assumptions (which he doesn't communicate in initial discussions) that make him unknowingly index his thinking. Since then, I've tried to mitigate these issues by a) having crisp clear agendas while discussing important matters, b) keep things in writing so that it's not his word against mine when we revisit it later, c) giving him direct feedback using situation-behaviour-impact framework and hoping to get him to see how and when the divergence occurred and how it impacts me and my product build.
Whenever a confrontation occurs, no matter how I preface it, any objective feedback is perceived by him as a personal attack. He gets defensive and responds in an aggressive manner. For example, when I gave feedback about how the customers he had acquired using a different revenue model has impacted our roadmap and my efforts, he barely acknowledged his part in the issue and simply lay it back on me saying "why didn't you tell me sooner? I've been working so hard on it - wish you had told me sooner". We're now introducing OKRs so that the focus is more on short-to-mid term outcomes rather than how we reach our objectives and goals. It's been slow progress but we're working out our northstar mission and high level OKRs amidst all the baggage.
I feel I've been using more management best practices in my startup than when I used to work in corporate. I just want to ship stuff sooner and get to market so that we kickstart the PMF journey, without having to endlessly discuss and debate things. To be fair, my co-founder and I agree on most things and we enjoy working with and supporting each other. It's just when we disagree that I find things much harder compared to the other professional debates I’ve had in my career. I know that disagreement between co-founders is a big issue for startups, but is this kind of divergence and disagreement normal? I'm far from perfect myself - so how can we communicate better in order to work productively? Any tips and feedback welcome.
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