Look for different traits in a co-founder than you would in a teammate or an employee.
By Poornima Vijayashanker (Founder, BizeeBee & Femgineer)
This post originally appeared on Femgineer.
We all have ideas for features, products and companies. But we cannot bring them to life alone. Partners and teams help us get out of our echo chambers, see possibilities we’ve never imagined, and put one foot in front of the other when the going gets rough.
The best teams are composed of individuals with complementary skill sets, and as we learned back in Episode 4, empathy for one another.
But you might be wondering: How does a team form over time? And how do you pick an initial partner or co-founder if you’re starting from scratch?
In today’s episode of FemgineerTV we’re going to talk about how to pick partners, assemble a founding team to get your idea off the ground, and reveal the key ingredient to a lasting partnership.
To help us out I’ve invited the co-founders of Pop Up Archive, Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith. Pop Up Archive is a startup based in Oakland, California that makes sound searchable by using cutting edge speech-to-text technology. Anne Wootton is the CEO and Bailey Smith is the CTO. We’ll learn about how, as co-founders, they split their responsibilities, support each other, and resolve conflicts.
Watch the episode and learn:
- The traits you should look for in a potential co-founder that are different from a teammate or an employee
- How to communicate setbacks to your co-founder
- How to critique each other constructively
If you’re actively looking for a co-founder or if you already have one and want to improve your partnership, you’ll want to watch this episode!
After you’ve watched the video, let us know what your favorite part was in the blog comments below.
About the guest blogger: Poornima Vijayashanker is the founder of BizeeBee, a platform that helps membership based business drive growth. Before acquisition she was the founding engineer at Mint.com, has launched Femgineer, a company that helps tech professionals and entrepreneurs level up their careers and has been one of Inc Magazine’s ’10 Women to Watch’ in tech.
