You want your co-founders/employees to reside at the intersection of really smart and really hard-working. Most of your friends probably do not live there. I went to a pretty decent school that claims to have lots of smart people, and most of my friends are not both really smart and really hard-working.We’re naturally inclined to do things with our friends: play racquetball, drink beer, etc. This is no different for starting a company. However, when picking co-founders, its human nature to either overlook or make excuses for your friends’ shortcomings. This is really bad, because it can lead to situations where you think things like this: I know my friend, Gideon isn’t the hardest worker, but he’s really really smart. It’ll probably be ok if we bring him on, I might just have to pick up the slack a little bit…
This might not seem that bad, but in a startup, everyone needs to be doing 150% of a normal job. And if Gideon is only doing 50% of his job, then you will end up doing 250% of a job. This will probably cause you to become very resentful, and you really don’t want to be resentful about something that you’re spending 15 hours a day on.
Furthermore, when you’ve had enough and you finally want to get rid of your friend, it becomes a non-trivial task, because you have to carefully balance his feelings against your need to divorce yourself from his incompetence. With an employee who isn’t your friend, you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll fuck up the weekly poker game.
John on May 30th, 2006 at 6:55 am
I’d never hire a frient to work for me cause I know if he’s not competence in his work it’ll be very hard to tell him that.