How much should investors weigh the quality of a founder's non-CEO cofounders?

Harry Stebbings · Mar 28, 2026 · hedged

Investors should evaluate a founding team by its spikiest member, usually the CEO, because the other co-founders often leave or get outgrown

The best founding teams frequently break up anyway — the CTO may fall away, leave, or be outgrown as head of engineering

Scope: framed as a provocation to test whether the founding relationship matters

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Harry Stebbings · Aug 8, 2026

One of the biggest mistakes investors make is turning down a company because they don't rate the non-CEO cofounder, since that cofounder usually isn't there in three years anyway.

The weaker cofounder is most often gone within three years, so the objection prices in a person who won't be around

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Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

The single best predictor of two founders avoiding founder conflict is whether they worked together before starting the company — friendship is not a substitute

You can know someone a long time yet they may be very different at work; he and Luis had worked together on research for two years before Duolingo

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Gili Raanan · Mar 28, 2026

The durability of a founding relationship can be tested with simple questions about shared history — whether the founders were roommates, worked together, or went through challenges together

Prior shared experience under stress is evidence the relationship will hold

Scope: concedes that sometimes you simply cannot know

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Jason Lemkin · May 27, 2024

When investing in a company with 10 or fewer employees, only the CEO and CTO matter — the quality of the one salesperson or marketer is irrelevant

At that stage there is no real management team to evaluate; he only changed to this view after learning to interview whole exec teams at later stages

15:00 At ten employees or fewer only ceo and cto quality matters

Jason Lemkin · May 6, 2022

An A-plus CEO paired with an A-plus CTO plus any traction at all is a combination on which you essentially cannot lose money

A CTO who ships five times faster than a merely good one gives the pair jaw-dropping iteration speed — even a botched quarter is fixed by next quarter's software; he cites Owner adding a marketing automation layer that produced $200k of revenue in its first month

49:39 An a plus ceo paired with an a plus cto plus traction is a near unbeatable investment

Trae Stephens · Apr 3, 2024

The most common way he misjudges founders is getting excited about one person's superpower when they fail to build a complete, skill-diverse founding and executive team

Brilliant individuals assume their specific superpower is enough; if they lack a strength like recruiting, the incompleteness of the team becomes hugely problematic for the business

38:04 Over indexing on one founders superpower while missing team completeness is a common misjudgment

Trae Stephens · Apr 3, 2024

Hard tech companies need someone on the founding team who is as good at business as the technical founder is at the technology, and investors must evaluate both sides.

Ten years at Founders Fund show the most successful hard tech companies are always paired with brilliant business people.

56:50 Hard tech needs a business equal to the technical founder

David Frankel · Aug 8, 2026

He will rarely invest when he thinks the CEO is amazing but a cofounder isn't up to scratch.

13:34 Weak cofounder is disqualifying even with a great ceo

David Frankel · Aug 8, 2026

The ideal early-stage founding pair is a CTO who is a technical magician and a CEO who is a strong salesperson, and of the two the CEO's entrepreneurial ability matters more because the CTO role is more fungible.

The CTO role can be replaced or reshaped depending on technical complexity, while the CEO's selling and entrepreneurial capacity cannot.

14:01 Ceo entrepreneurial ability outweighs the more fungible cto