My Co-Founder Quit This Week
My co-founder quit and I have questions.
So, my co-founder quit this week. Not traumatic, not unrecoverable, not devastating, but certainly a pause, like a splash of cold water in the face. He says he quit to go back to school, but lots of people say stuff like that to smooth over a socially awkward situation. It’s certainly given me a lot to think about, a lot of questions to ask him, and a lot of questions to ask myself.
We met at a coding bootcamp. I went to learn how to code so I’d never be beholden to another person for the tech in a project ever again. (Remind me to tell you about Comic Rocket some day.) Yet there I went, yet again.
The project started as something else, a game, with a crypto bent, and we got traction. Then I met with a potential investor/adviser and he had us pivot. We did. Then the advisor evaporated. We pivoted again, into the current incarnation until. . . COVID-19.
Our project involves going out in the real world and interacting with stores. Guess what? No going out, no interacting with stores while in lockdown. Okay. We pivoted again to making free websites for curbside delivery for merchants without a website. And that’s where we stopped because he decided to quit.
Now I’m left deciding if I should go on. I want to pivot back to the pre-COVID iteration. I could maybe do it myself but it will take me ten dedicated months probably. And I need a day job that actually gives me hours or wages soonish.
But beyond just the practical concerns (a technical co-founder would save me SO MUCH time) I have to wonder if I can work with a partner. Maybe he left because of me.
My partner was the technical lead on the project. I was doing all the business stuff, the documents, the organization, the pitching, the CEO stuff. He was the one doing all the programming, the implementation, the CTO stuff. Granted, the concept was mine, the structure of the application was based on my ideas, but I thought we were shaping it together.
Thinking back, did he feel that he had no ownership? Did I make the project just a job for him instead of a challenge and the joyful experience of building something new and important as a team? To borrow a term from the comics industry, was he just my wrist? Was I just using him to draw something I invented, not create something whose vision we shared?
And really, CAN I do this all myself? Doing all the CEO stuff and doing the programming might be a bear. I would have to learn a ton. I’ve only made an android app, and while I did go to a programming bootcamp as mentioned above, it’s not like I walked out of the place as anything more than a generalist. I know what to do (and where to look on Stack Overflow if I don’t) just not necessarily how to do it.
But even then, do I really want to go on with this thing? Was this really what I wanted to be when I grew up? Because now I have to ask myself ‘why’ a few times. Beyond just ‘why did they quit?’ but also ‘why do I even want to do this?’ Do I want to found this particular company? Why? What was it that appealed to me about doing it in the first place?
Without strong answers I’m leaning towards ‘no.’ Yet a meetup Zoom I attended yesterday was full of founders encouraging me to keep going. But what else are they going to say? Wrap it up, loser?
So, what’s my take away? If I want something done without a hitch, do it myself, I suppose. But really, if I want a co-founder, someone to brainstorm and really collaborate with, maybe I need to know what I can do next time to be a better partner. Maybe I should have realized that doing the physical work is only half the total job and working with a partner is work also: social relationship work.
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