A team built to last

Every founder talks to users

You and every founder should take part in interviews, user calls and observations. Basically, everyone should hear the problem from users firsthand.

This prevents one person from becoming the sole source of “customer truth.”

No technical black box

The same goes for tech. It shouldn’t rely on one person.

Some teams love to rely on one technical co-founder. The famous commercial + tech incredible teams.

Teams where the technical co-founder masters the details.

But I strongly disagree with this. EVERYONE should understand how the system works, the critical parts of the architecture, what’s hard vs what’s easy, and where the technical risks are.

Otherwise, people making decisions can’t see the risk coming, and these people are all the founders.

Take the example of Friendster. As the site grew, pages became painfully slow, but the board kept pushing new features and deals instead of fixing the infrastructure. Thus, users left for MySpace, and Friendster never recovered.

For deeply technical products, like an API or infrastructure, this is even more non-negotiable since the product is mostly the technology.

If that’s not enough, look at who runs the biggest tech companies. Many of their CEOs are technical experts too: Patrick Collison (Stripe), Tobi Lütke (Shopify) and Drew Houston (Dropbox) all started as programmers.

So if you are not technical, start learning now. It matters even more now that we have AI tools. When anyone can generate a product in a weekend, the edge goes to people who master complex things others don’t understand.

My take is that the best CEOs will be the ones who see what others can’t, and being technical is one pillar of that.

Agree before starting

Before starting, you and your co-founders should explicitly agree on:

• ambition and expected commitment
• working hours and availability
• risk tolerance and financial expectations
• fundraising, company size, and exit vs independence
• ownership, responsibilities and decision-making
• what happens if someone wants to leave

Have the difficult conversations now. “We’ll figure it out later” usually means fighting about it later, under pressure.

Ask any AI to generate a checklist from this paragraph and it should one-shot something sufficient, but just do it.

Complementary, not siloed

A good founding team covers different ground.

One of you is strong in product, another in engineering, another in sales or in the domain itself. Great, but not sufficient.

Of course, the worst case is two engineers alone who will build a great product nobody hears about. Or, two salespeople alone will sell something they can’t build.

But different strengths should not become separate worlds. In a siloed team, the engineer never hears a customer, the salesperson promises features without knowing what they cost, and each side blames the other when things slip.

To avoid it, share the work that matters. Join customer calls together, review the product together, and explain your decisions to each other until everyone could defend them.

Protect health and learning

I can’t insist enough on this one. Keep a sane baseline of sleep, physical activity, nutrition, relationships and time away from work.

Don’t fall for the FOMO of founders bragging about 100-hour weeks. The pragmatic choice is to stay healthy to perform better.

Working less is often working better on more important tasks.

If you can’t and find yourself working more and more, it means one of two things:

• You can’t see the real problem. A tired founder needs more hours to produce what a rested one would with better priorities and more focus. You are working more to make up for working worse, and you are too tired to notice.
• The bar is too high for you right now. You are not yet good enough to reach it at a healthy pace. Then lower the bar.

Never try to beat this by pushing harder. Accept it, and adjust.

Knowing all this is not enough. It has to be protected by structure because it’s hard to stay pragmatic.

One solution worth trying is an hours model close to a salaried job, with a start and an end to the day. A bounded schedule protects sleep and sports by default, and forces you to work better, not more.

There is no point in being wealthy or building a great company if you lose your health, or die young, on the way.

Another important topic is to always keep learning. It can feel like time taken away from the company, but it makes you better every day.

It helps you rethink your priorities in business and personal life, and more importantly, it compounds. In the long term, it is what lets you work less, not more.

Warren Buffett spends most of his day reading. Bill Gates disappears twice a year for Think Weeks, alone with a pile of books.

Finally, rest. Most of what people call rest is not rest. An hour of doomscrolling leaves you more tired than before.

Positive entertainment is different. Books, manga, webtoons, movies, good YouTube videos, art and music leave something behind, a story, an idea, a skill.

Even video games count, as long as they are great ones. Not the games designed to keep you hooked, but paid games made by people who care.

If I showed you my screen time, you would see almost no social media, and hours of books, webtoons and YouTube videos. Change your habits.