The 3 Critical Things All Co-Founders Should Have

Last spring, I had the privilege of sharing some of my entrepreneurial journey and the story of launching Localeur with a class at the McCombs School of Business. I guess they liked it as I’m honored to have been invited to come back and speak with two more MBA classes this week.

One of the most frequent questions I get when I do talks like this is “how do I find a co-founder?”

It’s an important question, but before you ask yourself where to look for a co-founder, I think it’s more important to know what to look for in a co-founder.

Before Localeur, I had a six-figure job at Bazaarvoice where I’d joined the user-generated-content startup a year before their 2012 IPO. Getting me to Bazaarvoice involved a lot of savvy recruiting by Heather Brunner, now the CEO of WP Engine, one of the fastest growing startups in Austin, and Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice’s co-founder and former CEO, whose new startup is in stealth mode, but putting together one of the best teams in Austin. I’m proud to say both are investors in Localeur, today, and Heather is on my board.

Aside from having a great mentor and board director like Heather and adviser and angel investor like Brett, working at Bazaarvoice also allowed me to make friends and gain access to Localeur advisers like Joe McCann (CEO and co-founder of NodeSource), Scott Bonneau (CTO of Wikibuy, former CTO of Polyvore) and Matt Curtin, who is also an investor (formerly an enterprise sales VP at Bazaarvoice and now revenue chief for Kinnser Software).

Most importantly, I met my co-founder Chase White. It’s his birthday today. Happy Birthday, Chase!

Localeur is Chase’s idea. It’s certainly evolved since he first shared it with me, but it’s important I start there because a lot of people think that me being the CEO means Localeur was my idea alone. Not true. That brings me to the first thing you should look for in a co-founder…

1. TRUST

Trust usually starts by having some pre-existing relationship. Chase and I weren’t good friends when we worked at Bazaarvoice — I was on the third floor with operations and marketing, he was on the second floor with product and design — but we respected one another’s work. Chase reached out to me about 6 months before I left Bazaarvoice because he’d heard about my work in creating and producing the first-ever style experiences for South by Southwest Festival. It wasn’t Bazaarvoice work that showed me how talented Chase was, but the design work he did for free for my side project during SXSW that caught my eye. From there, we had the foundation of a budding friendship that is necessary to build trust as co-founders. It’s also what allowed me to trust his initial vision for Localeur, and then contribute my own perspective to create a unified vision.

It’s not all roses, though. Chase and I have had some pretty huge arguments. For the first 24 months or so of Localeur, I would say we had at least one blow up argument per quarter. A lot of VCs write about founder fighting and there’s expensive camps now for co-founders to build trust and stuff, but these early disputes is what added an additional layer of trust, accountability and openness to our relationship. My oldest brother, who worked with us in the early going, was witness to one such argument, literally sitting in between us as we yelled at each other expletives and all in the office, and afterwards remarked he could tell that we had what it takes to succeed together because we argued and spoke openly like brothers.

Chase and I aren’t brothers nor best friends, but we’re very close, we’ve worked together for three solid years on Localeur, and the foundation of our relationship goes beyond whether or not we get each other birthday gifts or if we get beers together on Thursday…our relationship is built on trust.

2. PASSION

The thing that every set of co-founders needs in order to build trust is passion. Plain and simple, without passion, it’s almost impossible to sustain the type of grit, determination and drive necessary to make a startup work. Each co-founder must put all their eggs into the startup basket and bring all of their passion to their work every single day, no matter how stressful.

It’s also impossible to have those crucial conversations or make any meaningful progress beyond vanity metrics because without shared passion and unspoken agreement that you are working toward the same goal, those crucial conversations became little more than shouting matches intended to see who is the alpha male (or female) in a given situation. And the buzz of raising money from a strategic investor or getting press wears off quickly.

Because Localeur was Chase’s idea early on (the name wasn’t Localeur back then), Chase spent the better part of three months trying to persuade me to work with him on it. He hasn’t been highly involved in pitching the majority of our investors or closing our partnerships with most of the companies we’ve partnered with over the years…sales and pitching isn’t Chase’s forte…but the obscene amount of passion he showed me about the idea of his and how much he wanted to work with me on it is what initially sold me on the business. Only later did I throw myself completely into the local and travel tech sector and realize how little Yelp’s core product has evolved in a decade, and how massive our opportunity was with Localeur.

3. SKILL

Every co-founder should have a first-rate skill. I think this is table stakes.

I’m not a product person, I’m much more of an operations and go-to-market strategy specialist. My first-rate skills are in building communities, leveraging social media, developing content and building relationships with the media. If I was going to pursue a tech startup, I knew I needed a product lead. Luckily, I found Chase. (Since then, we’ve found our amazing founding engineer Chase Moody, too…I know, another Chase. We’re weird.)

Chase (my co-founder) is a product person, he’s not an engineer, but the way he understands consumer behavior and weaves that into design decisions and user experiences, is quite impressive. Consider this, Chase came up with our company name, designed our logo, developed the look and feel of our product and our investor deck (which VCs have told me we should charge other startups to design for them as a side hustle), and done all this with no more than two engineers throughout the three-year lifecycle of our business on our way to one million users while competing with companies like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Foursquare who are either publicly-traded or raised $200 million from VCs.

It is these core skills — marketing for me and design for Chase — that has allowed us to build trust in one another as founders. Trust in each other that because of the passion we have for this business, this problem and the skills we each bring to the table we could eventually learn all the other things we didn’t know and adapt quickly enough not to royally fuck up our chances of making this startup successful long-term.

Chase has had to learn all kinds of things about product design and user experience design and engineering that he didn’t know. I’ve had to learn tech fundraising on the fly in order to raise our first $1.6 million in angel funding over the last three years. And we’ve done this while averaging around two months of runway, sometimes even less, throughout our first three years and never once having more than six months of runway.

More than anything else, during those times when I’ve had to tell Chase that we couldn’t get paid for a few weeks or another VC rejected us or we have to go a bit longer with just two employees, he’s maintained a positive attitude and always shared my belief that Localeur’s future is brighter than its past.

The level of mutual respect we have, the amount of grit we’ve had to show, the trust we’ve built, the passion we share and the skills we continue to rely on directly to move this business forward are all the things that leave me feeling grateful to have such a phenomenal co-founder.

If you’re looking for a co-founder, don’t worry too much about where to find one. Put a lot more thought into making sure you know what to look for.