Chapter 2: Business Partners
Once you and your business partner get started building your business, it’s important not to step on each other’s toes. As I mentioned, you are your partner should each have different distinct skillsets. The magic of having a business partner is that you both get to work on different things at the same time.
It’s fairly common in early stage startups for each of the business partners to work on solving every single problem together. While the extra brainpower might feel more productive, it’s certainly not the most efficient use of your time. For this reason the best idea is to outline specific roles and responsibilities for each business partner, and then trust them to do that job. In one of my current startups, my responsibilities are product design & marketing (because that is my expertise). I have a business partner who spent 10 years in finance, and he’s handling all of our financial and regulatory concerns, and I have another business partner who is raising capital for our business. We all get together regularly to discuss problems or situations that overlap between our domains, but generally, we function as independent kings of our separate kingdoms.
Finally, if you only have one other business partner, and you guys each have a 50/50 share of the company, you’re going to need someone to have a tie-breaking vote. Even if it’s never used, you need some mechanism to prevent progress from completely stalling if the two of you can’t come to an agreement on something. For my 50/50 partnerships, we usually decide who has the tie-breaking vote by a coin flip. I’ve never actually had to use the vote to this day, but it’s an important failsafe to have just in case.