when your cofounder is also your competitor
why the best founding partnerships are built on admitting you both want the same win
we had 50 meetings this week. mostly with founders and investors prepping for our first major livestream event.
one pattern kept showing up: people asking how i scale when i've got 10 different projects going. the answer nobody wants: you can't. or rather, i can't. but my co-founder can do the things i can't.
and here's the tension: we both want to win at fundraising. we both want to build the best operator network. we're not pretending we don't.
the difference is that most partnerships break when they admit this. we leaned into it. we mapped it. i take the podcast. he takes the event live business. same goal. different lanes.
when you're building with someone instead of alongside them, you've solved for one of the hardest problems in founding: how do two alpha operators share the same cap table without killing each other?
you stop pretending you don't both want the crown. and you build something where you both wear it.
what would change about your partnerships if you named the competition first?