Fourteen wrong co-founders

August 15, 2025

The wrong cofounder will kill your startup faster than running out of money.
I learned this the hard way — 14 times.

It took me a while to learn how to hire and how to fire people.
Being nice guys is a catastrophic way of managing people.
My HOGAN test says I have only 9 out of 100 value of power (important trait to move forward your early-stage team).

Fourteen times, I thought I had found the right partner.
Fourteen times I was wrong.
Most were great developers.

But they had never gone without a paycheck.
Never built in uncertainty.
Never carried a product from zero to revenue, waited for specs, details.

I shipped the features, went home, and I was too scared to lose them. I've just waited for a miracle to happen.

Fatal for a startup, took me 3 months to recover.

Early-stage needs someone who holds the entire game board in their head, not just their own square.
This time I searched for an equal.

Someone who had built a product from nothing.
Seen it take its first steps.

Pushed through the moments when nothing worked and no one cared.
Stayed in the game when most would have walked away.

We met through a founder community.
Three conversations in, we were talking about money, failures, and weaknesses with no spin.

He spoke about mistakes the same way he spoke about successes, with a clear head.

That is when I knew.
Now we are testing each other in the field.
Daily syncs. Written plans. Building together.

Empy is a product about improving communication, so we test ourselves the same way:

Can we talk about uncomfortable things without politics or resentment?
So far, yes.