It’s hard enough to build and grow a startup company, but it’s pretty much impossible when facing internal headwinds. Sheer will alone cannot overcome the dysfunction of absent, arrogant, and quarrelling founders. It’s called founder drama and it’s a more common fate for startups than one might think. There are warning signs to beware of:
- They refer to themselves in online bios as the “Founder” of VentureX – even though there are other co-founders.
- They are generally absent from operations yet consider themselves to be an active founder simply because VentureX exists. Paired with the above, this is indicative of a God complex and is classic wantrepreneurship.
- They are generally absent from operations and yet curiously always around for media photo opportunities.
- They see their equity slice not as contribution but as entitlement, and they refer to it as a lottery ticket not a business. There’s no reasonable price one can buy out such Powerballers, and so you become trapped.
- They consider themselves to be an investor in the business simply for having co-founded it, not for having actually, you know, invested money in it. Bonus points if they actually could invest but don’t.
- They won’t learn basic venture math (i.e. how dilution works, where the value is in an aqui-hire) and don’t understand that a smaller slice of a bigger growing pie is much better than a big slice of nothing. Noam Wasserman called this the Founder’s Dilemma.
- They spend an awful lot of time “networking” with the same old drinking buddies.
- Their business associates elsewhere buffer them from managing people, and brush off empathy-lacking outbursts that cause employees to quit as acceptable “on the spectrum” behaviour.
- They ignore external existential legal threats to the business yet seem more eager to bully insiders instead.
- They give lip service to performance incentives for others but never seriously propose or implement anything. They will take advantage of your over-and-above hustle and sacrifice.
- They strut into internal meetings unprepared and spend much of the time focusing on the interests of their other projects.
- They don’t like evidence-based Customer Discovery methodologies and refuse to validate their own assumptions with prospective customers or investors. Double trouble if they surround themselves with sycophants (or Lean-unaware) who endorse such ignorance. You don’t want colleagues who not only can’t adapt to real world signals but who shoot messengers of any news contradicting their worldview.
- They spend precious pitch time talking about themselves and telling outdated or make-believe product scenario tales.
- They prefer that the board consists solely of them. When they alone are the board they still speak as though “the board has decided”. If they don’t comprehend what good governance is, or what Duty of Care entails, they don’t have the venture’s best interest in mind.
- They justify mistreating vendors and partners by saying Wall Street bullshit like: “It’s business. If you’re not prepared to do it then you shouldn’t be playing the game. To be frank, guys, that’s how business works.”
- They view people as pawns and friends as disposable.
