Ask HN: How to overcome the fear of doing more than your co-founder?

To give two sentences of background, I've been running businesses for 13 years, and running a startup for 4 years. The first business I built by myself from nothing, and the second I built alongside my technical co-founder.

Firstly I'm concerned that you seem to think that I'm suggesting finding a 'specialist' business co-founder. Being a co-founder is the exact opposite of specialisation. If you're a co-founder period, you do ANYTHING it takes to move things forward, no exceptions, ifs, ands or buts.

Also, without meaning to be picky, I believed you identified your co-founder as terrible. Someone who, as you described, believes that doing 'thought experiments' and trying to get twitter followers is the appropriate thing that a business co-founder should be doing in an early stage startup, is objectively a terrible business co-founder.

If your business co-founder is doing his job properly, there should never be any slack. Exactly the same as a technical co-founder. Companies, especially early stage companies, can and must be doing product mode and develop mode simultaneously.

I've never heard that joke, but as you grow your company and get more customers on board, who have more requirements, it's pretty important to have both salespeople and developers working in tandem to build out a company.

I agree with you that larger organisations can afford having specialists and smaller organisations cannot.

The idea that the business aspect is in any way 'much less demanding' is like chalk on the blackboard of my brain. This is not an idea or attitude that will serve you either in life, or in trying to find a great co-founder.

You could make the exact opposite argument about the technical aspect, since in startup land there's no point building something until you've validated the customer requirement for the solution you're working on, and then ideally talked to 20-50-100 potential customers.

1) You need to trust your cofounder(s) entirely. If you don't have trust, you will have fear, and that will lead to resentment and ultimately a breakdown of the relationship.

Doing work as a technical resource looks very different from doing work as a business resource. Technical challenges have demonstrable progress nearly every day, business challenges take weeks, months, dozens of emails, etc to show progress.

Do not confuse "business" with "easy" or "less time". My job is almost entirely administrative, despite doing coding and design a dozen hours a week. Being an admin is perhaps easier programming all day, but it is not trivial. It takes a special type of person to deal with the business wins and losses, give your cofounder some credit.

2) If you're technical, you will do a lot of the immediately hard work. The business problems, as stated above, are long-tail. They take time to show progress, and you have to be patient. I spend most of my days emailing, making phone calls, creating pipelines, financial modeling, and communicating with my employees (coworkers!) about what I am doing has seemed to satiate their curiosity and demonstrate to them that I am working my ass off to make this a great place to work and a great business.

I think you need to work on communicating with your cofounder(s). They should be able to talk about what they are doing every day, loop you into their progress, and demonstrate their value implicitly.

If you don't trust them though, this will never work.