Essays/linkedin/23-12-05 co founders

🧘🏽‍♂️ Founding teams should aim for complementary personalities, not complementary skills. At the beginning, being able to communicate with each other and with customers is so much more important than anything else.

Sometimes skills are used as a proxy for personality, but it can be a biased approach.

For deep-tech companies, if the "business person" and the "technical person" don't share a broad range of skills, the risk is that they'll build a communication barrier between them.

I have seen companies starting with a CEO and a CTO, where none could talk to customers. Especially in a B2B or B2Science setting, if the CEO and CTO have no target-industry experience, finding opportunities will be extremely hard.

A CEO that does not understand the product and the customers, is only an accountant. A CTO that does not understand the market and value proposition is just a technician.

💡 Technical founders should not be afraid of teaming up among themselves.

The important thing to remember is that complementary personalities help push forward complex ideas. Missing skills can be hired, outsourced, or developed, but personalities hardly will ever change.