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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

2 questions on the "friendship" issue:

1. How do you judge whether co-founders are good friends? I'm guessing a simple "how long have they been working together" test is a good indication, but anything else?

2. What level of feedback do you usually give teams that didn't make it? Especially teams that got to the interview stage but didn't make it through? I'm wondering if you've ever told a team your suspicions that they're not good enough friends (I'm assuming if you did, you phrased it better than that.)

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There are a lot of ways. Many of the questions on the YC application are at least partially about this. When and how did the founders meet? What have they worked on together? Even the stock split sometimes tells us a lot.

Yes, we've told groups that we weren't funding them because their friendship didn't seem strong enough to withstand a startup. You'd be surprised some of the meltdowns we've seen in interviews.

Is there a meaningful difference between friends who decide to do a startup together versus folks who decide to do a startup together and then become friends? The highest profile successes seem to be more an instance of the latter, but then success seems to help smooth any differences of opinion.

Yes, because in most startups there's a point where things seem hopeless. At that point the startup itself has no power to hold you together, because its expected value is (or appears to be) zero. You need a strong friendship to keep you together. E.g. I know for sure there were lots of times when Rtm thought Viaweb was never going to amount to anything, and only worked on it because I asked him to.

Were Woz and Jobs "friends"? Don't Page and Brin claim explicitly they weren't? It seems more like the shared purpose brought those pairs closer together than where they started or where they would have ended up had they never worked together.

That example of Viaweb helps clarify the distinction I'm thinking of. You guys were friends and so worked together despite differing convictions. But what of people who share a common purpose and in so doing become friends? Is there room in your model for that instance of the concept?

Were Woz and Jobs "friends"?

I believe the answer to that is "absolutely". They certainly weren't in it for the money at first. Woz had to be very explicitly convinced to leave his nice job at H-P even after they had built the first Apple PC.

If you insist that their friendship was somehow bogus because real friendships do not involve "shared purpose", I'm not sure I have any friends, by your weird definition. My high school friends had the shared purpose of playing games and entering math contests. My college friends had the shared purpose of graduating.

I'm pushing back on how friendships likely develop during a startup effort and how that's different from existing friendships that lead to a startup. Jobs and Woz, based on FaW, seem to fall more into the former category. Brin and Page too. By contrast, Gates and Allen, as childhood friends, seem to better fit pg's model. I'm not sure where you got that last bit from what I said.

I'm working with some great folks now and we simply started by trying to build something. We're still in that mindset. We didn't start out as friends but after eight months, we are. There's the pressure to get stuff done because we don't want to let each other down. We laugh more than we disagree. It feels like the friendships and the startup are growing together. I have a hard time thinking that the team could be flawed because we didn't start out knowing each other well.

pg isn't saying that your team is flawed - he's talking in general, and in a statistical sense. People who start out as friends before are more likely to succeed - that doesn't imply anything bad about your specific group. I think at the level where you're "interviewing" thousands of teams, looking for patterns starts to mean a lot.

I don't know about Woz/Jobs, but Page/Brin were definitely friends when they started a company.

They may not have been friends when they started collaborating on their first research project, but at the moment they were "co-founders", they had already become friends.

Jobs and Woz, as surprising as it might sound given the difference in personalities, were friends, based on what I've read, which is Woz's interview in Founders at Work and Sculley's Odyssey: Pepsi To Apple.

A lot had also changed by that point - namely they failed in selling the technology to Excite. Would they have stayed friends had they gotten the $1 million they wanted?

Shared trials make and break friendships.

There would seem to be a huge hack around that - I work with a guy who gets _really_ obsessive about stuff, so much so that he forgets to eat, etc.

Maybe you should focus on getting more people who are turned on by an idea, rather than because their friends might get burned.

what about brothers?

Hi, just recently applied for the next winter round and thought I would get involved and get a few words in! ;-) So the chances of getting accepted as a single founder (which I am) is harder, but surely having a flexible single founder willing to adapt, either by changing his idea or even to team up with other applicants to form a better foundation to move forward, is equally as good (or as risky) as Friends being co-founders. My point is, founders (friends, coders, family etc) could prove to consume more valuable time managing their personalities rather than getting the job done in the first 3 months to get VC's interested or even be accepted by Y-C as pointed out by "pg" in a previous post. There is clearly huge talent being pitched here and I was just keen to hear if Y-C ever formed new partnerships by connecting people?

This is very interesting, and maybe goes against normal reasoning. I've heard the general idea is not to become business partners with friends, but the opposite seems to be true with startups.

In the two startups I've been involved in previously, I hung in there because I didn't want to let the other person down. One ended up dissolving, but we remain on good terms. The other is ongoing, where I freelance, but give it my all because I don't want to let the other person down.

The third is new, and I just was approached by an old friend who wants to get involved. I thought about it for a second, then realized he's the kind of person I don't want to let down and I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual.

What are your thoughts the two founders being identical twin brothers?

So far siblings seem to work well.

Do you mostly care about groups sticking together long enough to get to profitability? Or are you also concerned about the founders having the same mindset?

Just sticking together. They don't have to have the same mindset. E.g. Jobs and Wozniak.

What would the ideal split be to be called the best of friends? 50-50? I can make a case for that and an uneven split too. Doesn't the split also depend on some combination of effort and potential of each founder?

I think its less of a friendship issue and more of the ability to "get" each other.

My co-founder and I have been working for almost 1.5 years on our startup. We have gone through so many iterations, we can see into each others minds. When an issue comes up, I know exactly what he is thinking and vis-versa. This ability is invaluable during negotiations, meetings, etc.

I don't think of us being on a friendship level, but its something greater. Its been said, its almost like your married to your co-founder - an analogy which is pretty much true. Your futures are tied together.

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