For co-founders
Do you want the same company?
Most co-founder breakups are not about the idea. They are about a difference that was mistaken for agreement in the first year and never named. A co-founder alignment session begins with what each of you privately believes about the company, the roles, the money and the exit, and ends with a written charter of what you have actually decided and who owns what.
Why this, and why now
The difference you mistook for agreement in year one.
Co-founder breakdowns are rarely about the idea. They are about an expectation each of you held, never stated, and both assumed was shared — which surfaces only when one of you is disappointed and the other cannot understand why.
The research on this is unambiguous and it is not about business. When people feel betrayed in a working relationship, the dominant cause is not that somebody reneged on something both understood. It is that the two of them held different unarticulated versions of the same obligation and discovered it at the point of breach. Nobody broke a promise. They had never established what the promise was.
- 55%of people reported that the other party had broken an unspoken expectation within two years — the paper is titled “not the exception but the norm”. Robinson and Rousseau, 1994.
- 24%of founders in two-founder venture-backed startups had left by year four — before a standard vesting schedule completes. Carta, 13,133 founders.
- .56the correlation between disagreeing about the work and disagreeing about each other. Argument about the business reliably becomes argument about the person. Ensley, Pearson and Amason, 2002.
A Map is the conversation that establishes what the promise actually was, while it still costs nothing to find out.
The full argument, for founders: Do You Want the Same Company? — twelve pages on why founding partnerships end over a difference that was agreed to in year one, including what the famous 65 per cent statistic actually measures. PDF, no email required.
When
Before it costs you.
Before you raise. Before you hire the first ten. When one of you is working harder than the other and nobody has said so. After the first serious disagreement. Before a third founder joins. Annually, as a habit.
How it works
- Before
- Each founder answers a private questionnaire about direction, roles, decision rights, money, pace and the exit, and marks eight agreements (equity and vesting, IP, roles and authority, compensation, capital, deadlock, a founder leaving, selling the company) as clear, unclear, different understandings, or not yet discussed. Your Director reads both before the session.
- The session
- A half-day on video, or a full day in person. Accounts, then assumptions, then commitments, then the charter, read back to the room.
- After
- The Alignment Charter: the decisions made, who owns them, and what each of you has committed to. And your Relational Map, to return to.
Pricing
- Virtual half-daytwo or three foundersfrom $3,500
- In person, at your sitefrom $6,500
- In wine country, through Terroir Trailsfrom $8,400
Not a performance assessment, not a personality quiz, not a surveillance tool. Private reflections are never shared with an employer, and an organizer cannot consent on anyone's behalf. See Privacy & care.
A few good questions
Is this mediation?
No. If you are in dispute, you need counsel or a mediator, and we will say so. This is for founders who are not in dispute yet and would like to stay that way.
Can our investor or board sponsor it?
They can pay for it. They cannot see the reflections, and the Charter is yours to share or not.
Can we do it with just two of us?
Yes. Two is the most common.