Rachel Lockett once helped pull a pair of exasperated co-founders back from the brink of a breakup. At first, it was the perfect match. Two co-founders, two complementary skill sets: The operational whiz and the visionary salesperson. They worked together in complete harmony. They assumed it would always be that way.
Then the company grew. They got busy. They were steering separate teams. One moved across the country and had children. They were no longer spending any time together. Both felt alone and unsupported. One founder even started to consider breaking up and selling the company early, while the other wanted to barrel ahead and keep scaling. Once-unconditional trust between the pair had fractured.
Lockett has noticed that as startups grow, there’s a familiar pattern with co-founders: After the honeymoon phase ends, they start to take their relationship for granted.
You may have heard the stat that 65% of startups fail because of co-founder breakups. So there’s a lot of pressure to find “the one.” Maybe you spent months dating around to search for someone who checks all your boxes. Or maybe you met your future co-founder years ago at your first job or in your freshman dorm, and your chemistry was so great you felt destined to start a company together.
Choosing the right co-founder is only part of what makes a successful pairing — you also have to consciously maintain that relationship.
“A lot of people get married and put the relationship on autopilot. The same is true with co-founders, and that doesn't work,” says Lockett. “You don’t run a business that way. You're actively managing it every single day. You have to do the same for your co-founder relationship.”
Lockett got her start in tech as a product manager at an edtech startup, and later pivoted into people strategy, where she witnessed two powerful co-founder duos in action: Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann at Pinterest and the Collison brothers at Stripe. “I saw that when there was alignment between the co-founders at the top, it really reverberated throughout the whole business,” she says.
Such partnerships might seem like magic from the outside, but Lockett knows that behind the scenes, they take a lot of dedication. Now an executive coach, she’s something of a co-founder therapist (she also happens to be the child of two psychologists). She’s helped dozens of co-founders find their spark again — and others split on good terms.
Ultimately, resilient co-founder relationships that can survive the extreme ups and downs of startup leadership aren’t simply the result of a perfect pairing. They’re built by deciding how you want to work and grow together from the outset, and by carving out room along the way for resets and reconnection.
So what does the maintenance that prevents co-founder drama and break-ups actually look like in practice? In this exclusive interview, Lockett shares a framework for how to establish the right relationship conditions from the start, the most common (and often sneaky) causes of friction and five rituals to build into your weekly, monthly and quarterly relationship rhythms.
Let’s dive in.
The diamond of co-founder dynamics
“Whenever I have an intake call with two co-founders to ask what they want out of coaching, their goals typically boil down to figuring out the misalignment in one of three buckets: shared vision and strategy, personal growth and the relationship itself,” says Lockett.
She has a framework for thinking about these three areas that’s shaped like a diamond: The company’s long-term plan at the top, each founder’s leadership evolution in the middle and the health of the relationship at the bottom.
Here’s how she defines each.
Vision and strategy
The first priority is alignment on where the company is headed: your one-, five-, even ten-year plan. You likely discussed this when you first dated — but naturally, things change as the business grows up. “You can't do great work together unless you’re aligned on where you're going,” says Lockett.
Pivots are typical, and Lockett finds that founders start to diverge on shared vision after a startup clinches product-market fit. “I asked two co-founders after they raised a Series A to write down their purpose for the next year, and they came up with really different answers,” she says. “One person thought building for scale operationally was the top business priority. The other wanted to innovate and launch two new business lines to acquire as many new customers as possible.”
That misalignment can stall progress, so Lockett recommends revisiting vision and strategy annually and top line goals regularly — ideally quarterly.
Each founder’s individual growth
Building a company is a constant exercise in giving away your Legos. And that often stirs up thorny feelings when founders have to give up the work they loved doing in the early days. “In my experience working with founders, that pace of growth requires deep and honest self-reflection about how to align your strengths with the needs of the business,” says Lockett.
Key milestones like a fundraise or bringing on senior leaders are natural points to reassess whether a co-founder’s title still tracks with what they’re doing — or would rather be doing. “I've worked with so many CEOs who find themselves lost because they raised money, and they had to hire someone to do something they were great at in the beginning. And then they feel stuck and depleted by operational, managerial work,” she says.
How you feel about your work as a founder has a huge impact on your co-founder. “You have to be aware of the delta between the skills you have and what the company needs, and work on it constantly, whether that’s through a mentor, advisor or coach, or hiring the right internal talent,” she says.
The relationship
This is the nuts and bolts of how you communicate. Trust, healthy conflict, commitment and accountability form the foundation of strong co-founder relationships.
And when things do go awry with the relationship itself, founders either shrug it off as a symptom of the hard work of company-building, or feel it’s too taboo to discuss with other teammates or board members.
“Most founders will admit to challenges with vision or growth, or even their co-founder’s skillset, but rarely call out the relationship itself,” says Lockett. “They’ll blame it on lack of product-market fit, when in reality the partnership is what’s keeping them up at night — and what’s slowing them and the business down.”
To scale your business, you have to attend to the vision and strategy, your individual growth and your relationship with each other. If any one of them is neglected, the diamond cracks.
Common scenarios for breakdowns
Lockett often observes this telltale sign that founders are headed toward a breakdown: They can’t give — or receive — hard feedback.
Here’s how that reared its head in one CTO-CEO pair she coached. “The CTO confided in me that he planned to go to the board and kick out the CEO because he was no longer a fit for his role. The CTO felt that the CEO wasn’t running the company effectively,” she says. “These two people were good friends from college, and the CTO had tried many ways to confront the CEO and tell him he wasn’t right for the job. But he felt if he pushed too much, the CEO would overthrow him.”
Founders often don’t recognize dysfunction until things get confrontational. “People think if they don’t argue, they have a healthy relationship. That just means there’s a lot going unsaid and resentment is building,” she says. “You need healthy conflict to make good decisions.”
Lockett says so many of the co-founder breakdowns she sees are preventable. You just have to diagnose the root cause and communicate through it. She walks through three common reasons behind co-founder friction as the “Three Rs,” pulled from a book called The Power of 2: Role, rules and relationship.
Role
Role evolutions are a sneaky cause of co-founder fights. “Founders feel shame when they have to step back from roles they once owned — it’s like the A+ student who thinks they have to be good at everything,” says Lockett.
She recalls coaching a previous co-founder couple: the CEO wanted to sell, and the Head of Product pushed for an IPO. But the true vision divergence was deeper than that. “Once I dug into that, I learned that the CEO actually hated his role, because he was completely depleted by managing the board and leadership team. He really missed being technical. Meanwhile, the Head of Product loved his role. They both thought there was endless potential for this business, but they had very different day-to-day experiences, and both had very different needs for rewards in the short versus long term,” she says.
If you don’t proactively recognize — and vocalize — your misalignment with your role, the burden falls on your co-founder. “When you're not honest about how you’re growing, it’s on your co-founder to be the person to tell you, ‘Hey, you want the CTO title, but you're not skilled at or really bad at hiring, and we need to double the size of our engineering team in the next six months,’” she says.
So how can founders know when role friction is the source of their woes? It’s not always obvious. Lockett likes to use this test: Does the work energize you more than 50% of the time? If not, you’re not living within your strengths, and that’s probably not good for your co-founder (or the business).
The strongest co-founders I work with don’t fight to keep the same job — they fight to do what’s best for the company and each other.
Rules
Your rules as a founding team are your compensation, equity split and expectations of personal commitment. Writing your rules down is an important part of making sure things feel fair.
Rules clashes often pop up when the rewards structure doesn’t track with the input of each founder. “When people are starting a company, they're often still working on something else,” Lockett says. “I worked with the CEO of a healthcare startup, and her co-founder was a doctor who was helping her raise money. But he was also still practicing. He was great for credibility, but he wasn’t executing on the work she needed him to do. And their equity was split. She felt that was completely unfair and undermined her ability to work with him. So they had to realign on expectations and rejigger the reward structure.”
She shares another example of a pair of female founders deep in the trenches of finding product-market fit who had different definitions of “grinding.” “One founder spent 10 years as the CEO of a high-growth tech company and sat on multiple boards. She was committed to the mission, but she also wanted to work at a different pace than her counterpart,” she says. “Her co-founder’s expectation was that early-stage founder mentality inherently meant working on nights and weekends. They struggled to find a balance.”
Lockett says it’s crucial to revisit all your agreements as the company evolves. Fairness isn’t defined once in the beginning — it’s a moving target that requires periodic recalibration.
Relationships
Other times, the source of co-founder conflict is the erosion of trust due to lack of communication and empathy — the bedrock of the relationship itself.
“Interpersonal dynamics are like a dance,” says Lockett. “It feels awkward when you’re stepping on each other’s feet and you don’t know why.”
Lockett likes how Dr. Sue Johnson’s book Hold Me Tight describes close relationships — romantic or professional. “The same patterns that appear in couples show up in co-founders, executive teams and other high-trust partnerships: when people feel emotionally unsafe, they protect themselves instead of collaborating,” she says.
Johnson’s book explains that partners fall into “negative conversation loops” based on underlying fears and needs that go unsaid. One partner will often hold onto a fixed story about the other, and they’ll talk past each other, no matter the topic.
Lockett shares how that negative conversation loop showed up in one co-founder pair. “I was working with the CEO and his co-founder, the COO. They had just hired a Head of Product, and the COO started to feel threatened. He hated how the CEO now deferred to someone else. He felt underappreciated, especially with some of his equity going to this new hire,” she says. “Every conversation between the two of them became tense. The COO questioned the CEO’s decision-making in front of the new Head of Product and other colleagues in a way he had never done before. The CEO would then waste energy defending his decision or avoiding the COO completely. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like they were on the same team.”
Lockett explains that the key to making up in a situation like this one is to first identify the pattern — or recognize the “demon dialogue,” as Johnson calls it. In this case, the co-founders were trapped in a loop of criticism and defense. “The CEO and COO had to acknowledge the loop they were stuck in with openness and curiosity. They can do that by sharing that something feels off and revealing their observations and feelings around it,” says Lockett. “Then once they’ve identified the negative conversation loop as the enemy, and not one another, they can get better at calling out that loop when they find themselves stuck in it again.”
Five practices to strengthen your relationship from the outset
You’ve got your diamond. You know how it cracks. What can you do early on to make sure that doesn’t happen?
Lockett recommends adding these five practices to your to-do list at the start of your relationship and making a habit out of revisiting them regularly.
1. Write (and renew) your co-founder vows
Lockett urges co-founders to draft an operating agreement — how you vow to show up for each other “in sickness and in health.”
“It’s not a legal document,” she says. “It’s a living pact on how you lead as a team.” She calls it a designed alliance: co-founders write down their North Star for the company, for themselves personally, and for the co-founder partnership. They then compare where they align and differ.
Your vows should cover:
- Your best-case scenario for the company
- How you want to be with one another (the culture you want to create)
- How you make decisions
- How you want to handle feedback and conflict
- How you’ll check-in and revisit how things are going
Lockett also recommends asking some more playful questions to help you create an identity around your partnership. A favorite of hers: What’s your co-founder relationship mascot?
You can also each take the Enneagram test to surface strengths, blind spots and clashes. Think of it like your co-founder love language. “It’s a huge relief for partners to be able to talk about where their types clash in a way that isn’t triggering. You can cultivate empathy for why your partner behaves the way they do,” she says.
Revisit this pact regularly. “Ask each quarter: What did we say we wanted? Are we living up to it or not?” she says.
2. Get outside support early on
Like in any close relationship, you need someone you can vent to — who isn’t just the other person in the relationship. Whether it’s a leadership coach or trusted board member, find a third-party sounding board.
Lockett says peers can be an especially powerful (and less expensive) group to lean on. That might be your founder friends or a CEO or CTO network, folks who can open up about how they’re navigating similar partnerships.
Therapy can help too. “Building a business is emotionally complex and challenging. And, look — both of my parents are therapists. I’m in full support of therapy. But it depends on the kinds of things you want to work on,” she says. “Therapy is helpful when you want to be your best self in the present and overcome something from the past. So that includes things like patterns of behavior you learn from childhood that are impacting your partnership.”
Whatever you choose, line up your support early. “Don’t wait for a crisis. The best time to get support is when things are going well — so they keep getting better,” she says.
In marriages, most people wait until they’re about to get divorced to go to couples therapy. But the healthiest relationships invest in their partnership — and seek outside support — early on.
3. Master healthy conflict using nonviolent communication
You and your co-founder are going to fight. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. “Conflict isn’t the problem. Avoiding conflict is,” says Lockett.
She likes to share the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) framework, initially developed by Marshall Rosenberg, with founders to give them some structure around sharing their feelings — without getting combative.
When you feel you need to confront your co-founder, try breaking down your response into these four parts:
- Observation. “When I saw you change the roadmap without looping me in…”
- Feeling. “…I felt frustrated and invisible.”
- Need. “Because I need transparency when we’re making major shifts.”
- Request. “Would you be willing to check in with me before changing shared plans like that?”
4. Carve out time for co-founder dates
Couples need quality time together outside the hubbub of their daily lives. Co-founders are no different.
“If you’re married and skip date nights or family check-ins, things unravel. It’s the same with co-founders — without intentional time together, everything drifts,” she says.
These dates should take three forms:
Put weekly 1:1s on the calendar.
Use your weekly check-ins to make space for what you’re thinking and feeling outside of the business day-to-day. Ask these questions:
- How are we doing as a team?
- What’s been unsaid that needs to be addressed?
- What do you need from me this week?
If weekly meetings aren’t feasible, settle on a rhythm that feels realistic — and respect that hold on your calendar. Ideally, these 1:1s should be about 45 minutes and they can be virtual.
Set aside time for quarterly in-person meetups.
Regardless of location, every few months, it’s essential to spend uninterrupted time together outside of work for at least two hours. Think of this like your vacation together.
Lockett recommends dinner or time outside of the office, such as a hike. “The goal is to create an environment that feels less like a business meeting and means you’re more open and connected,” she says.
Commit to an annual strategy session.
Finally, an annual offsite to revisit the company’s overall direction, how you’re each feeling about it, and how you’re navigating your roles is incredibly helpful. Ideally, this should be 3-4 hours in person.
5. Normalize role evolution
Your check-ins are a good time to discuss how you and your co-founder are feeling about how your roles are changing.
You should ask and answer honestly:
- Are we each in the seat that’s best for the company now?
- What are we each growing toward?
- What support do we need to evolve into what the business needs next?
Founders who evolve consciously stay on the same team, even if they switch roles.
Startups live or die based on the relationships of their leaders. “But don’t let that scare you. The work to maintain them starts with these small habits. Just like in a marriage, shared commitment to the vision, individual growth and a healthy relationship is all it takes. Everything else is learned behavior,” she says. “I recommend starting with one hour each week to invest in your co-founder relationship — it compounds over time.”