Cofounder Flow

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Our articles about improving co-founder relationships

Stay informed with product updates, company news, and insights on how to better align with your co-founder.

Dealing with Cofounder Conflict? A Founder’s Guide to Navigating Disagreements Without Divorce

Cofounder conflict is one of the most common challenges startups face, with nearly 25% of failures traced back to founder disputes.1 If you’re experiencing tension with your cofounder, you’re not alone, and it doesn’t mean your company is doomed. Conflict itself isn’t the problem—but how it’s managed. In high-stakes, resource-constrained environments like startups, disagreement is inevitable. Managed well, it can sharpen ideas, improve processes, and drive breakthrough strategies. Left unchecked

How to Find a Cofounder Who Fits Your Skills—and Your Style

When founders are looking to build their team, they usually think in terms of skills. A product visionary teams up with a technical expert. A designer joins forces with a marketing mastermind. Think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak: big-picture thinker meets engineering genius. On paper, a perfect match. But many teams with strong complementary skills can still fall apart. Not because they disagree on the vision. Not because someone isn’t pulling their weight. But because they experience friction

Research

Our Latest Research & Publications

Discover insights from our ongoing research into co-founder dynamics, partnership effectiveness, and startup success factors.

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A problem half-solved is a problem well-stated: Increasing the rate of innovation through team problem discovery

When teams try turning ideas into innovations, conventional wisdom says they need to start with a clear problem and stick with it. But being too clear too soon can make it harder to pivot when challenges arise. In this study of 579 teams from an innovation competition, we found that starting with lower clarity...

Read on ScienceDirect
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The Creative Thinking Profile

Our brain gets exercise by working on problems. However, different types of problems require different thinking styles. This paper shows how aligning particular creative thinking styles with a task can improve overall motivation and performance.

Read on ScienceDirect
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Dynamic Problem Solving Within Constraints

Feeling boxed-in can be frustrating, but may also be key to improving creativity and innovation. This paper describes how we always experience constraints when problem solving, but different levels on different dimensions can facilitate fundamentally different types of problem solving.

Read on ScienceDirect
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Harmony and Rhythm in Teamwork for Innovation

Teams work better when everyone is marching to the same beat. This paper describes how principles of music theory (such as tonality, harmony, and rhythm) can help teams better orchestrate their collaboration over time to improve innovation performance.

Read on SAGE Journals
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High-Stakes Innovation in Teams

You can't be innovative without taking risks. This paper shows that higher-stakes situations (i.e., having more to lose) can lead newly-formed teams to be less innovative, but longer-standing teams to be more innovative. What's the primary reason? In a word: trust.

Read on Oxford Academic

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