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Hey builders, welcome back to Build Mode. I'm your host Isabelle Johansson and today I am joined by the producer of Build Mode, Maggie Nye. Hello, hello. I am so excited to be here. We're wrapping up filming our next season, which is going to be all about fundraising, which is by far our most requested topic. So we have some really awesome guests coming down the pipeline for that. But before we release that, we wanted to go back into archive and share some valuable tips and stories and advice from guests that we've already had on. So today for this little clip show, we are going to be talking all about effective partnerships.
Effective partnerships can come in many shapes and sizes, whether it's with your co-founder, with your business partner, with your investors, with your employees. So Maggie has compiled the best tips and clips from our last seasons of our guests talking about how to build effective partnerships. Yes, and to kick it off, we're going to hear from Jasper Carmichael Jack, the co-founder and CEO of Artisan, about meeting his original co-founder online and spoiler alert, the partnership didn't last. Yeah, so I had an original co-founder who I met through a LinkedIn job listing who I started the company with um I think [clears throat] in October of 2022. Who we did Y Combinator with. And then my current co-founder joined in
November, so the month after we started. And [clears throat] during Y Combinator, she was there the whole time. And then things actually didn't work out with my original co-founder and my current co-founder became co-founder at the end of the YC batch. Aw. Yeah. Are you interested in digging into why it didn't work out with your co-founder? I can within legal limits, yeah. So I think it's hiring like hiring or finding a co-founder is one of the most difficult things because you need someone who's really good, but when you're early on in your career and when you don't have any track record, it's going to be very difficult to get someone very good. So, you kind of are in this catch-22 where you have a group people available to you and you
likely want someone who doesn't want to work with you. And you have to deal with that back and forth. When I found my original co-founder, we started working together within like a week of meeting on the company. So, it wasn't There was no deep uh No courting? No, no courting. No, it was just like straight No, no. Didn't even meet in person, actually. No, we just went straight into it. Um and I think we realized as time went on that maybe it wasn't the best fit and that it wasn't going to work out and I don't know if I would change anything because it did ultimately work out pretty well. But, yeah, I you need to be very thorough with who you're working with and make sure that you mesh with
them and make sure that it's going to be a successful partnership. Yeah, I mean, I think a co-founder relationship is pretty much the most important relationship in one's life. Like, you go through just so many challenges together and have to really, you know, persevere a lot. And yet, so many people find their co-founder Like, even you said, I've heard this before, online or just met quickly at a party or whatever. And then we have other founders who, you know, are married to their co-founders or they're siblings. And yet, they're able to work together. So, that's that's fair.
We're going to hear So, that's that's fair. We are going to hear from some married co-founders a bit later in this episode. But, first, we could not have an entire episode about effective partnerships without hearing a bit from Isabel's interview with Ian Schmidt. He's a partner and consultant at Tri-Mergence, which is an agency that coaches their startup clients through conflict and help them build effective dialogue frameworks and team structures. And honestly, if you are interested in the topic we are covering in this little clip show, you should really go listen to that full episode because it is just chock-full of great advice for navigating conflict and how leaders can reflect inward to be more confident and
how you can come back and rebuild trust with your team if, you know, some kind of conflict or incident does happen. It was really fascinating, so definitely recommend checking out that full episode. But, in the meantime, here is a short bit from that interview where Ian lays out how he develops a framework with a client for them to think about navigating conflict before an issue even arises. Let's dig into some of these sort of tools and frameworks, cuz now I'm picturing, you know, the perfect diverse team where we've got all the different skill sets and backgrounds and, you know, the beauty of the bouquet that comes with that.
How, you know, where do you start? What kind of challenges do you approach first and what sort of frameworks do you help introduce them to? Yeah, so as I mentioned before, we try to start before there's some big challenge or tension point. The first step is mapping your personal individual operating system. How do you tick? What are your gifts? What are your challenges? And having deep, honest conversations with yourself. Like, this is what I'm good at, this is what I'm not good at. And not just from uh expertise perspective, but how I communicate, how I lead people, um what happens when I'm triggered and fired up in a meeting. Um all of those different
dynamics, actually map those out, get them down into one page. We're big fans of pick a toolkit that everybody can standardize across, and then but then also boil it down. You got to make it quick, reference easy to reference, so you can keep moving fast, right? Second is get in a room together. And again, not just the team offsite. We feel like the missing piece is people might do work one-on-one with a coach and then they might do an offsite. And this relationship synchronizing is so critical, which is the relationship I have with you is different than the relationship I might have with somebody else. And we need to go deep on that. So, doing the personal work and pick a framework or a model that works well
and resonates for you and the rest of the team. Then get in a room and have a scaffolded conversation about here's what's working, here's what needs to improve, here's the latent potential. And then as I mentioned earlier, document those and then have some sort of ongoing cadence where you're checking in with each other. It might be quarterly. It might be at least once every half. And then all of that flows into the offsites that you have throughout the year. The other thing I think that's really important is through that process is building in a sense of an internal 360.
Where you're raising your own consciousness to see how you're showing up and impacting other people. And after the fact reflecting, holding yourself accountable. Going, circling back and doing repair if that's what's needed and making sure that the throughput is clean. Right? And then finally is there's a place for 360s and we do 360s, but I always say that's a great starting point and a commencement for cultivating a culture of feedback. So that there's a ongoing uh data feed between you and everybody else on the team. So that hopefully if we were to do a 360 again at some point, you'd look at it and be like, yep, yeah, I know all that. No, I heard that,
right? So that those honest conversations with each other along the way and not waiting. Something I've noticed listening to experts like Ian or second, third, fourth time founders is this idea of laying the groundwork before there's even a problem and really trusting and empowering your co-founder or your leadership team to do their best work and speak up if there's something blocking them from doing that work. And I know you're thinking this is low-key starting to sound like marriage advice and you are not wrong. Next we're going to hear from Hala Jawani and Alessio Chestanty, the co-founders of Revio and a married couple. And they have a really unlocked an amazing structure that allows them to shine and excel in their areas of expertise without stepping on each
other's toes. Like at the end, what you want in your co-founder is who's this person I could always go to brainstorm or to withdraw ideas or to talk about something specific. And then like the speed and trust for me is very important specially at the early stage of the company. So at this point like it's been 2 years already and we're we're constantly in this like iteration. It could be anywhere. It could be on a Sunday morning or on a Saturday night at the bar but we're going to constantly discuss um about it. Um I would say the separation is more at work where we all have our own lane. Alessio is leading all the
sales, I'm leading all of product and this is where we're able to lead to big stream but still stay connected. Right, yes, cuz I imagine yeah, you don't want to bring too much of the relationship into the workplace and kind of cuz you have a third co-founder. Right, so you know, and maybe so tell me a little bit about him and how he kind of navigates between the two of you and helps you. Yeah, our third co-founder, Leo, is the CTO. Um he's great because honestly it fits perfectly into this relationship. It's obviously a three co-founder relationship. He's also the one that brings sanity to the conversation. So it's kind of um uh crucial for us to have someone in the team that can also
draw the line, you know, sometimes. So, it works very well. Um I would say that super relevant for us is being able, as Alla said, to each of us have their own area of uh of expertise and their own area of the organization. And now that the team is growing, for example, now we're more than we're getting to 15 people now. We're growing. We're hiring a bunch more people this year. It's great because I have my own department, she has her own department, but at the same time we're super aligned and the company advanced at the same on the same front, so Yes, having your own lane is crucial when there are multiple co-founders,
whether they're married or siblings or friends or met on the internet. But, what about those solo founders out there? When you have a great idea, you've built a great product, and suddenly you have to be an expert in every single lane. Leah Sullivan founded TaskRabbit in 2008. And as a technical founder, stepping into the CEO role wasn't a natural fit at first. I work with a lot of, you know, early-stage technical founders. They So, they may have, you know, invented this idea or built it themselves. And, you know, the work that I do is to come in and help them learn to pitch it, get their branding and messaging. But, at some point they need to hire, you know, a business type, a
CEO type, to help them grow and scale the company. But, you are technical and were the CEO of TaskRabbit for many years, eight years? Yeah. Yeah, 8 9 years. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And so, at what point did you decide that, you know, you were going to step down as CEO and bring someone else in? Yeah. Well, there were a couple points in that journey, I got to say. And early on, I do, you know, if I'm being really honest with you, feel like I had this imposter syndrome. Like, I was a technical leader, I was a product leader. I did not go to business school. I didn't know how to build financial models, right? I mean, there was a huge learning curve to raising money and building a business like I did with
TaskRabbit. Um, and I was constantly looking for the right people to bring on to the team. And so, you know, one of those right people was Stacy Brown-Philpot, who I brought in as our COO. Um, and her and I just created such a special and important partnership. She was really in the trenches with me and really was my counterpart. And so, when I was ready, I was pregnant with my second child at that time and wanted to make a transition to the board, Stacy was ready to go. And I had full trust in her. And so, the board and I promoted her to CEO. I became chairman of the board. That decision was one of the easiest ones I made because we had built so much trust over the years between
each other. Trust really is the word of the day today. And we've touched a whole lot on internal team dynamics and how important trust is. So, for this clip, we're going to pivot and discuss the VC founder relationship. We're actually going to take you back to an episode from season 1 where Isabel spoke with Ross Fubinni from XYZ Ventures, as well as Leslie Finezaik from Gram and Walker. They're both incredibly thoughtful investors who have a real human first approach to investing. And at the core of their process working with new companies is, you guessed it, trust.
I think I see a lot of founders who will either say I'm raising right now and have sort of this rushed timeline, maybe they're trying to create investor FOMO, or they say no, we're not raising and they sort of stop having investor conversations. But, in reality, it sounds like more than a no, VCs are often giving a not right now, right? Give us some time to build this relationship. Don't go and approach VCs when you're desperate, but rather start early and start cultivating those relationships. I think on the flip side, to end with some founder advice, you know, we often see that a lot of VCs claim to be value-add and have all of these additional resources to offer founders, but like you said, Leslie,
money is a commodity and there is still, you know, many opportunities and options for founders of who they should take capital from. So, I would love to hear each of your three key things that we you would advise founders to consider when looking at different sources of capital, but in investors in general. Well, uh if you don't want to I'm going to go first cuz I only have three things. Like I use such a simple rubric and I talk about it all the time, which it's it's person, firm, terms. And the terms almost always collapse. So, the reality is it's it's what Leslie said. You're with this person for forever. So, it's everything from like, are they fun? Do you trust them? Do they
have the juice to get the deal done? It's everything around this human and then the distant second is this firm going to be helpful? Is the brand accretive? Do you like the other set of people around the table? Do you like the morals of the firm that you can discern? And then the terms behind it. Yeah, I don't know that I have three things. I completely agree. Money is a commodity, but people are not. And you're going to have a relationship with whoever is the steward about money for a really long time. When it's an angel investor or a GP-led firm, then that is the person. When it's a multi-partner, larger firm, that may not be the person, right? Like they may end up dropping off the board
and kind of handing off that board seat to somebody else. So, in those cases, you know, firm matters. So, I think like diligencing the person and some things that I would add is that you get to build a team with the money that you're raising, right? Like you're probably not just going to raise from a lead, you're going to fill it up with either other firms or with uh investors or with angel investors, especially in the early days. And I think that you almost get to like fill your bench, right? Like make it work for you. Not every investor needs to fill the same job on your cap table. Like some of them are there because they bring the money, some of them are there because they bring the name brand, some
of them are there because you need somebody that you can call when hits the fan, right? Like and to have like a real conversation with. I like to be like my value-add is that we're like I like to be the call before the board call, right? Like the one that you practice with. So yeah, every investor brings something different. You know, once you have that lead, you almost like get to decide what you do with the rest of the round. And I think that is a privilege for founders and I think that they should use it intelligently. So Leslie was just speaking to the choice that founders, if they're lucky enough, have as they are building their cap table. They can choose to select partners who have many different kinds of value-adds. For our next and final clip, you're
going to hear from Sara Lucena, the founder and CEO of Mapa, which is a behavioral intelligence platform that uses AI to decode human behavior patterns measured through voice. A theme of that conversation between Isabel and Sara was compatibility and how often looking for compatible hires and advisors and investors will create the best environment for growth. When you were raising your round, did you use Mapa to evaluate your investors? Yes. But like, in my defense, cuz we don't, of course, we don't have access to any of our users' behavioral reports unless they share that with us, right? Like and a lot of our users actually share their reports on social media and so on and so forth. So we end up
seeing a couple of things, but with investors specifically, they end up sharing with me. So that was the fun part cuz they know we all trust me to read their behavioral reports. Um and they were super interested also in giving us feedback, right? Like because that allow us to continue to train the models. Um the interesting thing is that uh we were able to actually really focused on compatibility as we raised our round, which end up bringing more and more uh interesting people to the table. What I'm trying to say with that is that there is this kind of like butterfly effect that we've seen happen not only with us, but also our customers, that when you are right rightly connected, when you find your people in a way, and then the folks
that will take the best of you, that also attracts more people that not to get to, you know, high level, but like that vibrates in the same, you know, um energy as you do. And that, you know, have the same interests and have the same view of the world. And they can also disagree with you in a bunch of different things, don't get me wrong. Like me and my investors and our partners, we have a lot of disagreements, but I think like never on the core reason why we are building this, right? Like not never on the deeper understanding of um who we are in the commitment we have uh with what we are building. So, I guess that's that's an interesting fact.
The moment we started to optimizing for compatibility on our round, that's when our round also accelerated, cuz the folks that were most compatible, and that's one thing, right? Like you don't want to and yes from every investor. Uh you actually want the no's, cuz the no's are, you know, probably people that don't really resonate with what you are building, and that's okay. Like what you are building it's not necessarily important for everybody. Rejection is just redirection. It's just redirection. I love that phrase because that's true. It's just kind of like showing a better path and when
you were intentional about it, um it has that effect, that multiplier effect, right? Like so the rejections it's not that it stops, but it reduces a lot just because you were kind of like surrounded with the right people. And that, dear builders, brings us to an end of this clip show. I had so much fun digging back through the archives and I hope you had fun listening to it. And if you did, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Be sure to subscribe to Build Mode wherever you listen and take it easy until we see you right back here next week. Build Mode is a TechCrunch podcast. Each episode is produced and edited by Maggie Nighy and hosted by me, Isabelle Rosenthal. Our art and design is also by Maggie Nighy.
A big thanks to Morgan Little who leads our audience development, the Foundry and Cheddar video teams, and most of all to you, the builders and everyone else in the wider startup community. We'll see you back here next time.
