Evaluating potential co-founders? Try going camping.

Time commitment: Less than 5 minutes.

Choosing co-founders might be the most important decision you make in your business when you’re getting started. A business is lot like a marriage. Co-founders commit to long term entanglements shaped as much by each co-founder’s weaknesses as by their strengths. Yes, you need to find co-founders whose strengths complement your own, but you also need co-founders whose weaknesses are tolerable, manageable, and don’t somehow exacerbate your own shortcomings. With marriage we’ve developed a loose system of courtship designed to help us evaluate potential mates. But how do you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a potential co-founder? Try going camping.

Just as in a new business, camping puts you in an unfamiliar environment to solve problems you don’t usually face (e.g. building a fire, etc.), and solutions to more pedestrian problems like food, water, and shelter become a new challenge.

You should stay in smallest tent that will fit all of your co-founders. It will be uncomfortable, and you will be getting in each other’s way at times. That’s the point. Starting a business is close quarters, and you will be sharing more of yourself with your co-founders than you might imagine. Your relationships with each other will be some of your biggest stressors, and the opportunity to experience those relationships under stress will let you see how well you can manage it.

You should make your camping trip as long as is safe and practical. Hopefully long enough for the novelty of camping to wear off a bit. As in camping, there’s a lot of excitement when you first start your business. That will fade eventually and what you will be left with is problems to solve and co-founders to solve them with. When the camping trip gets old it’s comforting to know relief is coming soon. The commitment is low. Everything from your real life is waiting for you right where you left it. But when you start a business, you are fundamentally changing your life, and making your co-founders a permanent piece of who you are, even if your business eventually ends. It would be nice to experience the best and the worst they have to offer before you make a life-altering commitment to them.

Also, camping is really really fun.

“Just in Case”

Time Commitment: 10 minutes if you also read Jason Fried’s post I’m responding to.

Yesterday Jason Fried of 37Signals put up a post asking: Employment contracts: What are they good for? If you haven’t read it it’s worth checking out. I responded to the post with a comment, which I’ve reproduced here:

First off, I am a lawyer, but this isn’t legal advice, and I’m not your attorney. :) Having a writing goes beyond issues of trust. At least, beyond trust of the individual. A writing is there as an affordance to human frailty. We simply aren’t very good at communicating and understanding things comprehensively, and we aren’t very good at remembering those things we do understand. So we write it down.

“Just in case” may be a weak argument, but let me try to give it a fair hearing at least before dismissing it.

A contract is just an agreement between two parties that the law will enforce. And, although there are some notable exceptions, a contract doesn’t have to be in writing to be formed. The advantages of having the agreement as a writing that’s signed are, among others:

(1) the formality of a writing assures that parties can be objectively treat as if they’ve entered an enforceable agreement, ‘just in case’ they don’t subjectively appreciate the import of what they’ve done;

(2) the agreement is memorialized in a way that’s resistant to imperfect recollection, ‘just in case’ each party later remembers the agreement differently;

(3) the parties are on notice of what the agreement is, ‘just in case’ there is a defect in either’s understanding;

(4) and the parties can override any default provisions of law that may apply, or otherwise may materially change the agreement, ‘just in case’ the defaults are unfavorable or counterintuitive.

Advantage (1) probably isn’t of much use in the employment setting because a reasonable person under the circumstances would know they’ve entered an agreement, whether or not there was a writing.

Advantage (2) is useful even when you are hiring great people. Memories fail and sometimes people harbor misunderstandings of their relationship based on bad recollection. The writing can serve as a reference to correct a misremembering.

Advantage (3) is probably the strongest. By making a writing you either resolve any misunderstandings or remove them through the ‘integration clause,’ which says that the writing comprises the entire agreement between the parties. This likewise stops problems before they start.

Advantage (4) is useful because the default provisions of law usually only come in to fill the gaps in the parties’ agreements, and without a writing there are likely more gaps to fill. And unless you’re a practicing attorney in the state where the agreement is formed and you’re familiar with the UCC, it’s hard to know what agreement you’d actually end up with once you apply the law.

The big “Just in case” though may be ‘just in case’ there is a dispute. But I contend that by having a writing you are actually decreasing the chances that a dispute arises, not just covering yourself in case it does. That goes beyond insurance.

Regarding the Backpack page, generally speaking employee handbooks are considered part of the contract between employee and employer, so you may be able to move most of the substance of the contract into a BackPack page and supplement with a simple one or two-page written agreement. You should consult your attorney about that though. I’m not licensed in Illinois yet and don’t know the rules there.

P.S. I’ll be at LessConf if you want to talk about this some more.