3 key inquiries to ask earlier than you begin an organization with a good friend

When my Bonobos cofounder, Brian Spaly, and I had a falling-out in 2009, two years after beginning the corporate, we made an odd determination. We determined that we might share the main points of how our partnership fell aside with the neighborhood the place our friendship and our firm had been cast: Stanford Enterprise Faculty.

Brian and I weren’t on talking phrases on the time, partially as a result of my cowardice in not choosing up the telephone. However we nonetheless held nice affinity for one another, and we felt in some methods let down by what we had realized—or ought to I say, not realized—at school.

A lot of the case-study protagonists who come by Stanford replicate the survivorship bias of entrepreneurs who’ve made it. However what in regards to the classes from those that failed? And the place had been the tales of the cofounders who bought divorced? Brian and I felt that we might have benefited if somebody had talked to us in regards to the darkish facet of partnering with associates.

The story of how issues went down for us—full with an appendix together with a manipulative e mail I despatched to Brian and an outline of the one-sided coup that I led—is now the topic of a business-school case that I’ve gone again to show a number of dozen instances over 15 years. (And by “educate,” I imply “function whipping boy for the good thing about others.”) On the finish of the case, I make a joke: “In relation to partnering with associates, don’t. Simply ask your grandmother. Grandmothers know.” Everybody laughs. However for a number of people, it’s nervous laughter—as a result of they’re already teaming up with classmates to begin firms.

Once I say, “Don’t do it,” I imply it, and I don’t. If I may return, I’d do Bonobos the very same means, and Brian—with whom I’m now on a lot better phrases—has advised me the identical. We wouldn’t have gotten it off the bottom if we hadn’t performed it collectively. Brian was the product genius, the innovator of better-fitting males’s pants. I used to be the man who was attempting to promote them on the web, constructing a brand new means of making manufacturers: digitally.

However I do need everybody to know that when you begin a enterprise with a good friend, you might be sublimating the friendship to the enterprise partnership. The laissezfaire dynamics that govern friendship—a relationship comparatively free from obligation and obligation—flip into one thing extra like a wedding.

In order for you that marriage to succeed, I’d search for three issues: alignment on core values like empathy, braveness, selfawareness, and resilience; mutual ardour for the mission; and diverging expertise and curiosity in what your roles ought to be on the firm.

Bonobos survived the divorce, and went on to prosper. I later got here to marvel if I had been the “larger drawback” within the relationship with Brian. That was true partially as a result of I wasn’t in a position to have the tough conversations required to construct an “antifragile” partnership—one that would not solely survive but in addition thrive beneath stress—and partially due to a temper dysfunction I had, which on the time went unacknowledged, unmedicated, and untreated (see my memoir, Burn Price).

In the meantime, Brian picked himself up and constructed Trunk Membership right into a formidable enterprise, later acquired by Nordstrom. He proved it was potential that Bonobos had parted methods with the incorrect cofounder.

Wins and learnings, for each of us.

Andy Dunn, the founding CEO of Bonobos and Pie, provides recommendation on main groups, constructing issues, and surviving the startup life. Obtained a query for Andy? Ship it to askandy@fortune.com.

This text seems within the October/November 2024 subject of Fortune with the headline “Do you have to launch a startup with a good friend?”

Get the newest on enterprise capital and personal fairness offers and dealmakers by subscribing to the Time period Sheet e-newsletter, delivered each weekday. Join right here.