🎧 Podcast
Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it A market-size fight is rarely just about the numbers, it is often power, recognition, and who gets the final say wearing a spreadsheet as a costume. Psychologist Matt Jones, who works with founding teams and wrote The Cofounder Effect, walks through how to have the disagreement without damaging the relationship: contain the conflict, use non-blaming language, and translate the operational dispute into what is really going on underneath. Listen to this before your next hard conversation so the argument stays about the market and not about each other.
Why Startups Fail Due to Co-Founder Conflict and How to Fix It (with psychologist Matt Jones)
On The Startup CEO Show by Mark MacLeod (host), Matt Jones (guest) ~45 min
- Roughly two thirds of promising startups fail from cofounder conflict, so treating disagreement as a skill to practice is not soft, it is survival.
- Contain the conflict (scheduled time, private, non-accusatory language) so a single argument does not spill into your execution.
- Regular cofounder check-ins on how the partnership itself is working prevent small disagreements from hardening into resentment.