Chapter 2

The Power of Two – do I need a co-founder?

I always tell my boys that you can only make one bad decision in life, and that relates to who you marry.

Choose the right partner and any problem is surmountable. Choose the wrong partner and when the going gets tough (and even the best marriages face challenges – financial issues, illness, emigration, death of a loved one) they run for the hills.

To me, the best way to depict a good relationship is to take a triangle and draw a line down the middle: as long as the two triangles are balanced, relationships work. Never forget that one party is responsible for 50 per cent of any relationship and another party is responsible for the other 50 per cent. Have you ever had a friendship where you feel that you are doing everything for the relationship and they never do anything? Eventually something has got to give.

The same principle applies to your relationships with family, friends and at work. Both parties have to know what value they need to add to each other to keep those two triangles in balance. So, when you choose a co-founder, it’s essential that you both know exactly what is expected of each of you to ensure that you keep adding value to each other. As your company grows, make sure that you keep re-evaluating how those obligations may change as the challenges of a growing business evolve.

Once, at a staff induction day, someone said to me, ‘Dave, that’s not true, I’ve just had a baby and all I do is change nappies and feed him.’ I responded by saying, ‘I have a dad who’s nearly 80 and I’m pushing him around in a wheelchair.’ When you look at a relationship, don’t look at it on a day-to-day basis, look at it over a reasonable period of time – and make sure that you are contributing what’s expected of you and that the other side of the triangle is delivering whatever is expected of them. So, whether you are a founder, a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, an employer or employee, understand that you have certain expectations to meet. There is always another party involved who is relying on you to meet your side of the bargain. Make sure that you are aligned.

The same is true for a business partner. Business is tough, make no mistake about it. Even when it’s going well, it’s taxing. How do we fund our growth? How do we continue to attract and retain the same high-quality resources that we secured as a startup? How do we ensure that the level of service that we provide is consistent across regions? Running a company requires a tremendous amount of energy – you are constantly dealing with things that are in your control and things that are out of your control.

Choosing the right business partner can help alleviate the strain – that pillar of support will always be there when you most need it. Some of the world’s greatest companies have been started by co-founders. I call it the Power of Two: the two Steves at Apple, Bill and Paul at Microsoft, Larry and Sergey at Google, and – closer to home – Mike and Scott from Atlassian, Nick and Anthony at Afterpay, Mel and Cliff from Canva, and Larry and Peter at Zip. In fact, we backed Larry and Peter because Larry was the front-of-house founder, while we saw such a safe and steady pair of hands in Peter, who would be looking after the back of house – a critical component of a business that was going to be lending money. Even looking back on my own career, while I may have been the sole founder, my brother Jon and I ran the company together – I used to worry about tomorrow while Jon worried about today.

The key to finding the right partner is simple, but fundamental. You not only need complementary skills, so that you are able to add value to one another, but, just as importantly, you also need to share like-minded values. I reckon in all the examples I have listed above, 1 + 1 = 3. But I’m sure that for every success, there are many more failures.

In a nutshell: when choosing a co-founder or a business partner, once you’ve made that call, it’s very hard to get out of it. Make sure that you’re not doing it because it’s daunting to start a company on your own – it’s a whole lot worse running a company when you’re dealing with a misaligned partner. So, make sure that you each have complementary skills and a similar mindset and that you would be willing to go into battle with your partner when the shit hits the fan. And trust me, if it hasn’t yet, it will. Ask Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Elon Musk.

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