In every startup, the founders come together; face all of the challenges together hoping one day to be funded and be able to change the industry. They want to be able to change the user's life to such an extent that they are a name associated with success and achievements.
In this journey, very few founders do actually realise what is coming towards them along with investments and investors, money and scale up, team and growth.
Here, I aim at offering the top three survival tools for co-founders which play a key role in making it through this post investment phase.
Tool 1 - STATE OF MIND
Understand each other's state of mind and what have they seen Investments as.
Founders assume that the state of mind which, knowingly or unknowingly, played a key role for the founders during the years they struggled will keep them going after the funding as well. After receiving the funding they feel that they have won the wars so far and nothing can ever change that. Its a lie...
The first thing which changes, as a team and as an individual with money is the State of Mind. Every founder has a unique take of the situation. Before the money comes in, the goal is only to get funded and all of the other differences are not noticed as much. Once the money is pumped into the company, the differences begin to shine through. Suddenly their thoughts are different, and so are their perspectives on the investments receive. For the founders, talking about this repeatedly (sometimes fighting and arguing helps; it is then that the co-founders are most vulnerable and clarity emerges) and coming back to a one point agenda; the right thing for the startup. This will enable a clear way forward for the co-founders to understand each other, work and help each other, and proceed to the next level of their startup.
Some different thoughts which occur;
- We have been funded, fuelled up, time to go forward with full force.
- We have been funded, we need to be careful, watch each step and decision forward from here
- Nothing much changes, money has never been important for us, for me, my co-founders are the board and nothing must ever change, we proceed the way we always did