You wrote the business plan together. You agreed on the problem, the market, the direction. You can both pitch the product vision in your sleep. And then the startup starts moving — and within weeks, you realise you and your co-founder are building toward two slightly different versions of the same company. Not because anyone … Read more
The most common advice about co-founder alignment focuses on equity splits, roles, and values. That’s important, but it misses the conflict that actually shows up first in most startups: the two of you are looking at the same product and seeing different things. One founder sees what could be built. The other sees what needs … Read more
Every founder has a product vision. It’s clear in their head — the product they want to build, the market they want to serve, the problem they’re going to solve. The difficulty is rarely the product vision itself. It’s that the vision usually exists as two separate things: a technical picture of what could be built and a commercial picture of what the market will pay for. Those two pictures live in different people’s heads, get articulated in different ways, and point in subtly different directions.