A survey to help potential co-founders explore their relationship and discover (in)compatibilities early on.
Please read the contribution guidelines if you want to contribute. 🙏
- Roles
- Logistics
- Finances & Equity
- Exits
- Personal Finances
- Culture
- Co-founder relationship
- Life Planning
- Process
- Business
- Staffing
- What would you want your role to be? (e.g. CEO/CTO/COO/etc.)
- What would you want your role to be, before we reach product market fit (PMF)?
- What would you want your role to be, once we reach PMF?
- What would you want your role to be, we start to really scale?
- If your role becomes unavailable (e.g. the board hires a professional CEO), what would you want your new role to be?
- What are the areas of responsibility (AORs) for the CEO?
- What are the AORs for the CTO?
- What are the AORs for the COO/CPO/etc.?
- Rank yourself in these areas (both as an IC, and as a leader) on a scale of 1-10:
| Sales | Marketing | Product |
| Design | Engineering | Operations |
| Fundraising | Leadership | Company Building |
| Recruiting | Legal | Specific Skills^ |
^ company specific skills (e.g. Healthcare, ML, etc.)
- Rate your passion in each of the above areas on a scale of none to high. (e.g. I'm an 8 in sales, but hate it now).
- Cluster AORs based on rank, discuss, and assign to individuals. (John is a 10 in Product and gets that AOR).
- Break ties using the passion rating. (e.g. Nick is a 7 in Sales with medium passion and Gloria is a 7 in Sales with high passion)
- Discuss: do these clusters align with everyones expectations, skills, and desires?
- Where should our startup be based?
- Where should our startup be incorporated?
- What kind of corporate entity should our startup be? (LLC, S-Corp, PBC)
- How do you feel about remote or distributed teams?
- How should founder equity be set?
- How should employee equity be set?
- How do you think about how we raise money?
- How much money should we raise? (zero <---> As much as we can)
- How much equity should we give up?
- What happens if we get an acquisition offer for 8 figures? 9 figures? 10 figures?
- What kind of exit strategy do you have in mind?
- How would you go about negotiating an acquisition?
- If we end up selling for less than we raised, how would you structure the deal? (e.g. 90M vs. 120M)
- What is your runway?
- What is your personal burn-rate?
- What is the minimal monthly salary you need to survive?
- What is the monthly salary you need to be comfortable?
- What is the salary you need to be happy for the long term?
- If we run out of capital, how would you support yourself?
- How would you craft company culture?
- In the range of "bootstrapped small business" to "go big or go home", where do you want this startup to go?
- How much of your time do you hope to spend either working or socializing with work people?
- How important is "getting rich" to you as a startup objective?
- How important is "changing the world" to you as a startup objective?
- How important is diversity in hiring? What concretely would that mean?
- Suppose that our product is being used by Trump’s administration to create a "Muslim registry". What should we do?
- What kind of personal and professional side projects are you working on?
- What would you want the policy of Advising/consulting with other companies to be?
- How much should we (the co-founders) communicate with each other?
- How do you cope with stress? depression?
- What self-destructive/self-undermining behavior do you have?
- How would we resolve personal conflict between ourselves?
- How would we resolve stalemates between co-founders?
- How would you go about handling a startup divorce?
- How would you think about bringing on a 3rd (N+1) cofounder?
These questions would be discriminatory for employee hiring, but could be relevant for founders. Tread carefully.
- Are you planning on buying a house (in the next 0-5 years)?
- Are you planning on having kids (in the next 0-5 years)?
- Are you planning any other large life changes? (e.g. moving cities, going back to school, etc.)
- How much formal process should the company have at each stage?
- What techniques do you use for personal productivity?
- What processes/values/techniques/etc would you use to get the most out of your team/company?
- How much should we pay attention to competition?
- How important is getting featured (either as a company, or personally) in the press to you. Why?
- What is your framework for evaluating business opportunities?
- How will you know when we've found product market fit (PMF)?
- What do we do if we find PMF on a product, none of the founders are excited about?
- How do you think about paying employees?
- How much equity should early employees be given?
- How will you create growth opportunities for early employees?
- What is your framework for evaluating potential employees?
- An employee asks for a small loan of $2000. What do you do?
- What are the most important parts of attracting and retaining great people?
- You’re recruiting employees. A candidate is looking good but then you discover a thing about them. What do you do when you find out that:
- They used to work for the NSA?
- They have tweeted positively about alt-right causes?
- They have tweeted positively about social justice causes?
- They have tweeted positively about libertarian causes?
- They have tweeted positively about anarchist causes?
- They have posted on HN and they were a real jerk?
H/T to my friend Gloria Lin for crafting the original. 🕵🏼♀️
