Dmitry Mishunin founder & CEO at HashEx Blockchain Security.
“Don’t work with your friends” is a saying that has almost become a cliche at this point. This is the “I told you so” after any disappointing business endeavor between friends. It doesn’t matter much whether the experience was a big project or an hour in the roles of employer and employee.
This would be the end of the story, but there are more than a few examples of married couples or best friends successfully running a business—like Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham, the spouses who founded Y Combinator, and David Karp and Marco Arment, the friends who founded the blog platform Tumblr. Situations also exist where successful business partners become friends.
Why do some people end up with a disappointing or even devastating experience, while others reap all of the perks while strengthening their relationship? What is the difference between the two situations?
Choosing People
First, I want to separate the conversations about psychological types. Yes, all people are indeed different; some are softer, some are harsh, some are patient and others are explosive. However, even the most patient people lose it.
Why do you decide to build a business relationship with another person? The most trivial and often true answer is that you have the goal to hang a shelf and you find someone who can do a quality and affordable job.
Now, let’s complicate it a little bit. You want to step away from your company’s management and are looking for a COO. It has to be someone who is trustworthy, responsible, a hard worker with good time management skills, educated, smart with experience in the industry and so on.
When a business relationship is built on friendship, the motivation is entirely different. You have a complex task that you can only entrust to a friend. A friend will do a good job, offer a good price and won’t lie or cheat you. Does any of that sound familiar?
Why We End Up Disappointed
There’s a difference between the two cases. Both are focused on personal qualities. Responsibility and expertise are present in both and yes, they are important for a job well done. In the first case, we are analyzing a specific person and determining whether they possess the required qualities. We complete an assessment.
The second case is built around an imaginary concept of a “friend.” A friend won’t let you down, and that’s it. You can trust a friend.
When a friend turns out to be less than experienced or irresponsible, our expectations clash with reality. It hurts us. It’s a painful experience. We start blaming our friends for all that goes wrong, and our project ends up in shambles.
Let’s roll back to the beginning of this business-friendship. You have to know your friend well enough to understand whether they have the required qualities or not. It sounds simple, but let’s take a look at my own experience.
Failure And Success
One of my close friends was a good programmer at a big company. He wasn’t happy with his salary and wanted to launch a pet project. Around the same time, I had a startup idea, and the prototype looked like a one-man job. My friend’s name was the first one that came to mind. We shook on it: I would take care of marketing and the product part and he would do the coding. We started, and weeks went by. On release day, I anticipated the rocket that would fly us to the moon.
I opened the app and saw a very raw prototype. It looked even worse than our first pen-and-paper sketch. Half of the features weren’t ready and the rest hardly worked. I had no desire to continue the project, and the relationship took a massive hit.
Looking back, I only knew my friend was a good programmer from his own words. We’d never worked together before and I had never seen any results of his work. I just believed him when he said it. I also knew he wasn’t happy with his income, but I had no idea what salary he’d be comfortable with.
Additionally, while I knew of my friend’s desire to launch a pet project, I didn’t even know whether he had any free time. I expected him to give his all to our project, but he had a demanding day job. He coded for our project in his free time, hence the result.
In contrast, there was another time when we were looking for a project manager (PM) for one of our new and complex products. We wanted to find someone who could, in time, grow to become the CEO of the project, and my partner brought his friend’s resume. She had a degree in math and led a department of over 150 employees. She had a great interview and her test task was stellar. She got right into the core of things from day one and gained the respect of the team.
Friendship had nothing to do with it. Instead, the employee was chosen for their professional qualities.
If you want to have a productive collaboration, you have to assess your friend like you would someone new. You need to review the qualities of the person rather than a virtual “ride or die” friend.
Working with someone you know well isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but even the people we know and trust have to be scrutinized when it comes to matters of business. The working environment has a very different dynamic, and maintaining it is often the key to a successful venture.
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