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Comment by jyu | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you got a bad cofounder. I was listening to a VentureHacks talk about finding a cofounder, and they had two main points:

1. Is your team making progress? Because startups have fewer people and resources, your founding team needs to be effective producers.

2. Do you guys trust each other to have your back? An example they gave was how two cofounders were arguing over equity. Instead of arguing that the other guy should get less equity, they were doing the opposite and insisting that the other guy should be getting more. And from that, they knew there was some underlying trust that drove their decisions.

Seems like this guy is breaking that trust repeatedly by doing weird stuff. And continues to do it after your confrontation. This sounds like a situation that will only get worse.

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We definitely could have been more efficient, we had a lot to learn. But the biggest problem I see is that we were still quite efficient producing features but not so much validating assumptions and developing customers/users (my stance: "let's go test it now and perhaps make some mistakes publicly but get feedback early", his stance: "it won't work unless we finish feature X, we have to change our business model and implement feature Y to target customers more likely to pay because this awesome guy from this large company I just met says they would pay", my reaction: "ok, sounds reasonable, let's try it." and it of course lead nowhere :) the awesome new guy probably changed his opinion, etc.).

And yeah, I have difficulties with trust maybe in general but I believe I've done my part well enough in this case.

Who says anyone changed their opinion?

Sorry, but it appears to me to be that he wants as most coding done as possible before he invariable cuts you out of the deal. Going public would mean that you have a kind of partnership and are therefore entitled to equity. By keeping it private, or in a prototype phase, he can keep the number of people who are aware you are working together to a minimum.

> Who says anyone changed their opinion?

I don't know what happened but I know the "awesome new guy" seems to be actually ok and very reasonable. He just fails to see the real point of the project and I think my cofounder is swayed too easily by unfounded opinions of people of a seemingly high status.

I actually don't think my cofounder is that much evil but he is out of touch with reality and refuses to engage in any communication that points it out. And yes, he's protecting his contacts quite hard and quite explicitly at times. Also tries to conceal the real state of things - I found out he got hired by the VC company only indirectly and after asking him a lot.

what kind of a co-founder "protects" his contacts from a fellow co-founder? Dysfunctional relationship at best. Cut him off, take everything you've built and go somewhere else. He's got nothing legal against you.

Then start learning abt VC, meeting people, and cutting deals by yourself. It's not that hard.

Whatever happens I hope things work out for you.

Thank you

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