You-wouldnt-treat-a-customer-the-way-you-treat-your-cofounder.txt

You wouldn't treat a customer the way you treat your cofounder
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As founders, we know that people respond to incentives.

You recruit the best talent with strong offers of cash + equity. You land customers with delightful products and responsive customer service. Even when training AI models, you use rewards to get the behavior you want.

And when things go wrong, you ask yourself how you could change to get a better response. If a customer churns, you do a post-mortem on what went wrong in your process. You don't blame them for leaving.

But when it comes to getting your cofounder to stop $DUMB_ACTION, things get weird.

I see too many founders rely on 95% negative feedback / criticism, then wonder why things aren’t getting better.

Why This Happens

Most founders are brutal on themselves. A lot of us became who we are by pushing through harsh feedback and negative self-talk. In small doses, this works. But the longer you work on a startup with someone, the more you start seeing them as an extension of yourself. If you're hard on yourself, you're hard on them too.

This creates problems, especially since most people respond better to positive reinforcement. Even if they’re also hard on themselves, it’s different when the criticism comes from someone else. (Probably part of why you all became founders rather than work for someone else).

But this isn’t the most effective strategy.

The Research on Negative Impact

John Gottman's research on relationships showed that couples in conflict who successfully stayed married had 5 positive interactions for every 1 negative. Stuff like making a joke, accepting a point, saying sorry, and paying a compliment were all considered positive. This ratio was measured DURING an argument / conflict (in good times it was actually higher - 20:1)

Couples who eventually divorced only had a 0.8:1 positive to negative ratio while disagreeing. So every time you tell your cofounder “You’re not doing enough sales outreach” or “Why are we always missing our launch dates?”, you are adding to the denominator.

And during times of stress (basically every day at a starutp), this becomes even more of an issue. During tough times, people become hypervigilant for negativity. Gottman calls it “Negative sentiment override”. Neutral or even positive messages get read as attacks. In one study, unhappy partners only caught 50% of the positive interactions that outside observers could clearly see (Robinson & Price 1980).

This means when you finally offer encouragement, your cofounder might not even hear it. The training data is so negative, their classifier reads even neutral inputs as threats.

Supportive Trust

So maybe you’re thinking - “why can’t they just fix this obvious problem like an adult” or “they’re too smart to need all this praise” but I’m going to stop you right there.

We all have things that are easy to change or fix and things that are hard. If it was really just that easy, they would have done it already. And sometimes the criticism can trigger resistance — we’ve all felt that “don’t tell me what to do” feeling.

When I work with founders in conflict, I describe supportive trust as the positive emotional foundation that make good partnerships work. It comes from shared experiences, being there for each other, and knowing your cofounder respects and values you. That foundation makes requests for change easier to receive and act on.

Positive feedback builds that supportive trust. Gottman describes it like changing your mental filter: instead of scanning for what your cofounder is doing wrong, explicitly call out what they’re doing right. You build a deeper baseline of appreciation and respect - and change is a lot easier.

Try This

Do more to reinforce what your cofounder does right.

"Appreciate you flagging that you were blocked on the API integration instead of just sitting on it"
"I saw you followed up with the design contractor on your own, that made things a lot easier on my end"
“Thanks for being hands on with the new engineer’s ramp up, I know you’d sometimes rather be writing code.”
"I noticed you've been tighter on sprint planning lately, it's making a difference"
This is not about being pretend nice. You still give feedback. You still call out problems. But you'll be far more effective reinforcing the behavior you want to see, rather than only calling out the mistake or problem or thinking "finally, why can't you do it like that all the time" and staying silent.

And it doesn’t hurt to say something positive about other things they do well that you value.

It’s easy to take your cofounder for granted. Especially if you’ve been in the trenches and have a long history. But even if they should know you value them, it still matters a lot (perhaps even more) that you continue to do those little things.

And it will ultimately help you get what you need in the end faster and easier. Change made under duress rarely sticks.

Bottom Line

Bring up what needs changing and why. But ease up on the constant criticism and try positive feedback instead.

"Hey, thanks for doing that. I know you're trying, and I appreciate it."

When a user can't complete a flow, you fix the UX. You don't tell them they should have figured it out. Your cofounder deserves at least that same level of thoughtfulness.