
How to deal with painful cofounder / friend? - source99
3 close friends started a company that does automated analysis of sensor data.<p>3 years in we have zero costs and 1 big customer. The company had revenues of $150K in 2015.<p>All profits are split 1&#x2F;3 each. Equity is split 1&#x2F;3 each.<p>1 of the friends&#x2F;cofounders is a pain. The other 2 founders agree on this assessment. The main problems with annoying cofounder is his dogmatic attitude and short term vision. He would rather charge our only customer for every minor software tweak instead of enabling our customer to build their business bigger which would in turn help our business. He does not want to do any work to seek out new business.  He refuses to help on any parts of the business that he did not explicitly choose to work on.<p>I tried to offer a deal to him this week where I would take on new development efforts for a new product. I would not expect him to contribute at all but he insisted that he still get 1&#x2F;3 split because I would be using some functionality that we had already developed though I plan to rewrite everything from scratch because our existing code base is a POS.<p>I would like to get him to agree to take a lower revenue split because I don&#x27;t want to work with him but he took a hard line and offered to help build the product which is not what I wanted.<p>The 2 cofounders that agree on his poor attitude have not kicked him out because of long standing friendship.<p>Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated?
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sharemywin
you should be focused on finding new clients. why would you spend a bunch of
effort on a new product unless you've exhausted sales efforts for your
existing one. Each sales on your existing product is money in everyone's
pocket. New development seems like a distraction. Also, maybe you should view
his opinion as a good counter sink to you and your other friends opinions.
Different view points is a good thing and will happen a lot more if you ever
bring on more people. And if your main method of convincing people of your
view point is "because I say so" you will have a bunch of yes man working for
you. Also, you all need to work on a process to come to making decisions that
will get better over time. A lot of times you can test ideas out and see if
one is better. As for general high level things like charging customers maybe
find a middle ground. or agree on a 2/3 vote for decisions. If he's coding and
working on things then I would choose advice against "cutting him out"

