├── README.md └── contributing.md /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Co-Founder Survey 2 | 3 | > A survey to help potential co-founders explore their relationship and discover (in)compatibilities early on. 4 | 5 | Please read the [contribution guidelines](contributing.md) if you want to contribute. 🙏 6 | 7 | ### Table of Contents 8 | 9 | - [Roles](#roles) 10 | - [Logistics](#logistics) 11 | - [Finances & Equity](#finances-&-equity) 12 | - [Exits](#exits) 13 | - [Personal Finances](#personal-finances) 14 | - [Culture](#culture) 15 | - [Co-founder relationship](#co-founder-relationship) 16 | - [Life Planning](#life-planning) 17 | - [Process](#process) 18 | - [Business](#business) 19 | - [Staffing](#staffing) 20 | 21 | ### Roles 22 | 23 | * What would you want your role to be? (e.g. CEO/CTO/COO/etc.) 24 | * What would you want your role to be, before we reach product market fit (PMF)? 25 | * What would you want your role to be, once we reach PMF? 26 | * What would you want your role to be, we start to really scale? 27 | * If your role becomes unavailable (e.g. the board hires a professional CEO), what would you want your new role to be? 28 | * What are the areas of responsibility (AORs) for the CEO? 29 | * What are the AORs for the CTO? 30 | * What are the AORs for the COO/CPO/etc.? 31 | 32 | #### Areas of Responsibility Exercise: 33 | 1. Rank yourself in these areas (both as an IC, and as a leader) on a scale of 1-10: 34 | 35 | |||| 36 | | ------------- |:-------------:|:-----:| 37 | | Sales | Marketing | Product | 38 | | Design | Engineering | Operations | 39 | | Fundraising | Leadership | Company Building | 40 | | Recruiting | Legal | Specific Skills^ | 41 | 42 | ^ company specific skills (e.g. Healthcare, ML, etc.) 43 | 44 | 45 | 2. Rate your passion in each of the above areas on a scale of none to high. (e.g. I'm an 8 in sales, but hate it now). 46 | 3. Cluster AORs based on rank, discuss, and assign to individuals. (John is a 10 in Product and gets that AOR). 47 | 4. Break ties using the passion rating. (e.g. Nick is a 7 in Sales with medium passion and Gloria is a 7 in Sales with high passion) 48 | 5. **Discuss:** do these clusters align with everyones expectations, skills, and desires? 49 | 50 | ### Logistics 51 | 52 | * Where should our startup be based? 53 | * Where should our startup be incorporated? 54 | * What kind of corporate entity should our startup be? (LLC, S-Corp, PBC) 55 | * How do you feel about remote or distributed teams? 56 | 57 | 58 | ### Finances & Equity 59 | 60 | * How should founder equity be set? 61 | * How should employee equity be set? 62 | * How do you think about how we raise money? 63 | * How much money should we raise? (zero <---> As much as we can) 64 | * How much equity should we give up? 65 | 66 | ### Exits 67 | 68 | * What happens if we get an acquisition offer for 8 figures? 9 figures? 10 figures? 69 | * What kind of exit strategy do you have in mind? 70 | * How would you go about negotiating an acquisition? 71 | * If we end up selling for less than we raised, how would you structure the deal? (e.g. 90M vs. 120M) 72 | 73 | 74 | ### Personal Finances 75 | 76 | * What is your runway? 77 | * What is your personal burn-rate? 78 | * What is the minimal monthly salary you need to survive? 79 | * What is the monthly salary you need to be comfortable? 80 | * What is the salary you need to be happy for the long term? 81 | * If we run out of capital, how would you support yourself? 82 | 83 | ### Culture 84 | 85 | * How would you craft company culture? 86 | * In the range of "bootstrapped small business" to "go big or go home", where do you want this startup to go? 87 | * How much of your time do you hope to spend either working or socializing with work people? 88 | * How important is "getting rich" to you as a startup objective? 89 | * How important is "changing the world" to you as a startup objective? 90 | * How important is diversity in hiring? What concretely would that mean? 91 | * Suppose that our product is being used by Trump’s administration to create a "Muslim registry". What should we do? 92 | * What kind of personal and professional side projects are you working on? 93 | * What would you want the policy of Advising/consulting with other companies to be? 94 | 95 | ### Co-founder relationship 96 | 97 | * How much should we (the co-founders) communicate with each other? 98 | * How do you cope with stress? depression? 99 | * What self-destructive/self-undermining behavior do you have? 100 | * How would we resolve personal conflict between ourselves? 101 | * How would we resolve stalemates between co-founders? 102 | * How would you go about handling a startup divorce? 103 | * How would you think about bringing on a 3rd (N+1) cofounder? 104 | 105 | ### Life Planning 106 | > These questions would be discriminatory for employee hiring, but could be relevant for founders. Tread carefully. 107 | 108 | * Are you planning on buying a house (in the next 0-5 years)? 109 | * Are you planning on having kids (in the next 0-5 years)? 110 | * Are you planning any other large life changes? (e.g. moving cities, going back to school, etc.) 111 | 112 | 113 | ### Process 114 | 115 | * How much formal process should the company have at each stage? 116 | * What techniques do you use for personal productivity? 117 | * What processes/values/techniques/etc would you use to get the most out of your team/company? 118 | 119 | 120 | ### Business 121 | 122 | * How much should we pay attention to competition? 123 | * How important is getting featured (either as a company, or personally) in the press to you. Why? 124 | * What is your framework for evaluating business opportunities? 125 | * How will you know when we've found product market fit (PMF)? 126 | * What do we do if we find PMF on a product, none of the founders are excited about? 127 | 128 | ### Staffing 129 | 130 | * How do you think about paying employees? 131 | * How much equity should early employees be given? 132 | * How will you create growth opportunities for early employees? 133 | * What is your framework for evaluating potential employees? 134 | * An employee asks for a small loan of $2000. What do you do? 135 | * What are the most important parts of attracting and retaining great people? 136 | * You’re recruiting employees. A candidate is looking good but then you discover a thing about them. What do you do when you find out that: 137 | - They used to work for the NSA? 138 | - They have tweeted positively about alt-right causes? 139 | - They have tweeted positively about social justice causes? 140 | - They have tweeted positively about libertarian causes? 141 | - They have tweeted positively about anarchist causes? 142 | - They have posted on HN and they were a real jerk? 143 | 144 | ### Credits 145 | H/T to my friend [Gloria Lin](https://github.com/glo) for crafting the original. 🕵🏼‍♀️ 146 | 147 | ### License 148 | 149 | [![CC0](https://i.creativecommons.org/p/zero/1.0/88x31.png)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) 150 | 151 | 152 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /contributing.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Contribution Guidelines 2 | 3 | ## Table of Contents 4 | - [Adding to this survey](#adding-to-this-survey) 5 | - [Adding something to the survey ](#adding-something-to-the-survey) 6 | - [Updating your Pull Request](#updating-your-pull-request) 7 | 8 | ## Adding to this survey 9 | 10 | Please ensure your pull request adheres to the following guidelines: 11 | 12 | - Search previous suggestions before making a new one, as yours may be a duplicate. 13 | - Make sure the additions are useful before submitting. That implies it has enough content and is relevant to most founders. 14 | - Make an individual pull request for each suggestion. 15 | - Use [title-casing](http://titlecapitalization.com) (AP style). 16 | - Additions should be added to the bottom of the relevant category. 17 | - New categories or improvements to the existing categorization are welcome. 18 | - Check your spelling and grammar. 19 | - Make sure your text editor is set to remove trailing whitespace. 20 | - The pull request and commit should have a useful title. 21 | 22 | Thank you for your suggestions! 23 | 24 | ## Adding something to the survey 25 | 26 | If you have something awesome to contribute to an awesome list, this is how you do it. 27 | 28 | You'll need a [GitHub account](https://github.com/join)! 29 | 30 | 1. Access the [survey](https://github.com/nickls/co-founder-survey). 31 | 2. Click on the `README.md` file 32 | 3. Now click on the edit icon. 33 | 4. You can start editing the text of the file in the in-browser editor. Make sure you follow guidelines above. You can use [GitHub Flavored Markdown](https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown/). 34 | 5. Say why you're proposing the changes, and then click on "Propose file change". 35 | 6. Submit the [pull request](https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/)! 36 | 37 | ## Updating your Pull Request 38 | 39 | Sometimes, the maintainer will ask you to edit your Pull Request before it is included. This is normally due to spelling errors or because your PR was missing something. 40 | 41 | [Here](https://github.com/RichardLitt/docs/blob/master/amending-a-commit-guide.md) is a write up on how to change a Pull Request, and the different ways you can do that. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------