Tackling Founder Conflicts with Will Klippgen

[00:00:00] Will: I don't know what that means, because if we see a conflict before we have invested, we will just run faster than Usain Bolt can do his hundred meters and take the train to wherever is furthest away from that founding team. Yeah. But then again, I also cannot avoid saying that sometimes we are not the best mediators in therapy.

[00:00:18] Will: It's because we are not independent, right? We have an interest in this. So it's impossible not to have conflicts, but when the conflicts become unhealthy, when the team doesn't. have the depth in their relationship to actually talk about the conflict if there are deep, deep, deep underlying issues like

[00:00:42] Rahul: Welcome back to Understanding VC. I'm your host Rahul. Understanding VC is a perpetual MBA on a single subject, venture capital. And today I'll be having an in depth conversation on founder conflicts and how founding teams can navigate them with Will Klipkin. Will is a managing partner at Cocoon Capital, an early stage VC firm based in Singapore, [00:01:00] investing in B2B and deep tech startups across Southeast Asia.

[00:01:03] Rahul: Now let's talk to him.

[00:01:05] Rahul: Hey, will, thank you so much for joining

[00:01:07] Will: me today. Hey, thanks for inviting. It's always a pleasure.

[00:01:11] Rahul: So I was reading a research by startup genome project. Um, it says that the number one reason why a startup fail is because of founder conflicts attributing to like 65 percent of startup failures.

[00:01:25] Rahul: So would you agree? And how true is that, especially in Southeast Asia?

[00:01:32] Will: That's the first time I hear that number, but, and I have to say it, it does resonate because, you know, at the stage of an early stage startup, the founders are basically the most important resource, in Southeast Asia, Or at least in cocoons portfolio, right?

[00:01:52] Will: We haven't really seen founder conflicts as being the biggest reason for failure, [00:02:00] but that's definitely it does definitely happen. I would say that sometimes there is too little conflict as well. I would probably say that there are just as many companies that fail because founders are Not clashing enough.

[00:02:16] Will: So what I try to say is that there are sometimes good conflict and there's bad conflict, but yeah, that's an extreme number. Um, I think especially I think in environments where a lot of perhaps more extreme personalities are being funded, you probably would see that conflicts. Can go to that level for us in cocoon.

[00:02:42] Will: I think that we probably stay away from those personalities more because we have been kind of burnt in the past. We are very careful about which founders we invest in. Okay,

[00:02:53] Rahul: so again, curious. What is the number one reason your startups fail that you've [00:03:00] seen

[00:03:00] Will: lack off being able to reach product market fit?

[00:03:04] Will: Yeah. Yeah. Within a certain time. Yeah.

[00:03:09] Rahul: And you mentioned that you stay away from personalities, strong personalities who are prone for, you know, conflicts. How would you define those founders or teams?

[00:03:24] Will: I think what we have done, I think we started doing that during COVID. We tried to take a more systematic approach in analyzing founding teams.

[00:03:35] Will: A good founding team definitely should be more than one person. That's why we call it a team, perhaps two or three. And I think it's important for us to see that there is a kind of symbiotic, good energy relationship within the team. Yeah. Cool. Cool. We do pro that we spend a lot of time with the founding teams.

[00:03:57] Will: We kind of try to be super [00:04:00] sensitive to anything that indicates that this is not a healthy relationship in the team. Um, it's like a marriage, right? In a way, uh, with three people or more, sometimes two people, and you have to have. Some level of difference in personality. That's fine. It could be a combination of introvert and extrovert founders, for example, which is very healthy.

[00:04:27] Will: people that tend to build are usually more introverted. People that tend to sell want to sell and or market the company tend to be more extrovert. That's healthy. But it cannot be to that level where that relationship basically results in poor communication or in. Two extreme differences in time in terms of ownership of the company, for example, yeah, or if there's a lack of respect.

[00:04:57] Will: So, so basically, founder team relationship [00:05:00] is like any other relationship, right ships that they have to be healthy. Although people inside might not always agree with each other and people might be very different, but there has to be a mutual respect.

[00:05:13] Rahul: Yeah, you also mentioned about good conflicts and bad conflicts.

[00:05:17] Rahul: So how would you define a good conflict? So,

[00:05:21] Will: so as I said, the major reason why companies fail for us.is that they fail to do something or deliver something that the market want to pay for or want to pay sufficiently for sufficiently fast. And to reach that level, you have to, yes, you have to ask the market, but then you also have to interpret what the market tells you.

[00:05:45] Will: to really reach that understanding, you sometimes need a team with different views and different ways of seeing that research or with an ability to then adapt to that when you decide that this is where you want to go for a while. So [00:06:00] it really requires people to be contributing and being listened to.

[00:06:06] Will: to get the healthy engagement, where everyone is kind of working towards the same goal.

[00:06:11] Rahul: Yeah, definitely. Like if you have two founders who think alike, then what is the point of the

[00:06:17] Will: other person? Exactly. So, so that would be a company we probably wouldn't invest in if people are too similar. Yeah.

[00:06:23] Will: And therefore, again, as I said, leads to failure. Yeah. Easily.

[00:06:28] Rahul: Yeah. So you've been, an investor for a long time now. Uh, what are the kind of, conflicts? Most frequent that you sort of encountered

[00:06:40] Will: Yeah, I think the biggest conflict stems from, large differences in personalities and or cultures.

[00:06:51] Will: if you both have a big difference in personality and culture, the chance of achieving a state where communication is very [00:07:00] bad or where there is not mutual respect is very high. So if you are in that kind of team, right, a small conflict can escalate very fast.especially if you have founders with, personality disorders, more or less.

[00:07:18] Will: defined, for example, we tend to see that, for example, narcissistic founders tend to take, for example, the CEO position in the team. We do know that a lot of CEOs are narcissists or even psychopaths sometimes. but even narcissism, which is a soft way of being a psychopath or sociopath, tend to create a very unhealthy team environment, right?

[00:07:43] Will: So they tend to look out for themselves more than the team. If something good happens, it's their fault. Achievement, if something bad happens to someone else's, as a co founder, you won't take that for too long. Right? So another thing is that if you have [00:08:00] an unhealthy, state of mind like that, for example, if you're a CEO, you tend to take decisions yourself.

[00:08:07] Will: You do not listen or you don't care about the opinions of the remaining team members. And that's usually a very bad idea.

[00:08:16] Rahul: But this personality disorder, the another thing that research says is that a lot of founders have these sort of neurodivergent issues.

[00:08:27] Will: Sure. I mean, there's a reason why I became a founder. I didn't really enjoy working in a big company, right? And there are reasons why people become founders that Might not necessarily lead them to be great team players or amazing at leading a company with 500 people and that's a whole other topic we can talk about, right?

[00:08:48] Will: But, yeah, usually founders are quite healthy. they're just not happy with the kind of status quo or they just want to kind of change the world a bit faster and [00:09:00] what it can do within a big corporate. So. I would, I wouldn't say it's a normal thing to have what we can classify as a personality disorder, but it does happen and that's definitely a source of conflict.

[00:09:13] Rahul: Yeah, and I think the cultural thing is very important because a lot of times problem happen because you're, if you know what, where the other person is coming from. And that's easier if you've known the person for a long time or you're from the same culture where the behaviors are like all of sort of,so yeah, that, that I really think, plays a big part.

[00:09:37] Rahul: I think, um, you know, the, the one thing that Ray Dalio has at Bridgewater Associates is that they have these baseball cards for everybody and people write like, um,this is how I work. This is how I like to do these. These are things that I

[00:09:52] Will: don't like

[00:09:53] Will: That's that's that's a great way to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:56] Rahul: And, you mentioned about big personalities. What is that [00:10:00]

[00:10:00] Will: big personality? Yeah. I think going back to the, to, to what I said, some kind of thinking that you are so much better than the other founders. And that might happen that there are teams where the guy that, or man or woman, I say guy without gender.

[00:10:20] Will: Things that he or she is the best and smartest one in the room and sometimes they are right and if they are so much smarter than the other co founders, then basically this guy found the wrong co founders because then there's not that mutual respect that creates a healthy. Climate for debate and progression towards something.

[00:10:44] Will: I mean, in, in some cases that let's say CEO, amazing superstar founder is so smart that it doesn't matter what all the other founders do. And yeah, but that's rare and it definitely doesn't lead to a harmonious team and [00:11:00] it definitely leads to conflict. Yeah. So it basically stops that person from perhaps carrying out what that person should have done had he or she been a bit better at, you know, navigating this in a nice way with the rest of the team.

[00:11:14] Rahul: And usually,conflicts tend to happen more during early stages, I

[00:11:18] Will: think the pressure is on right in, in the early stage where you're trying to find out what you're going to create. So. It's not so much, much about when, when should we launch this product or what should we do? Which country should we go to after this is basically what the hell should we do to actually make something that anyone would pay for?

[00:11:37] Will: Right? So it's like, so it's a make or break stage of the company. So conflicts tend to, to be more severe and everything is at stake. Yeah. It's not, it's not the next year's numbers going to be to your 10 million revenue is going to be, will this company ever survive, right?

[00:11:57] Rahul: Yeah. What are some of [00:12:00] the, the other reasons, especially for, conflicts besides big personality?

[00:12:05] Rahul: you know, what else did we talk about? Narcissistic founder decided people with disorders,

[00:12:12] Will: right? I think they're always going to be conflict, right? So one thing would be perhaps one team member is underperforming or is withdrawing from the team. Stops coming to work, not doing what, what they said they could do because they basically can't do it, creates a lot of unhappiness.

[00:12:32] Will: there could be different kind of basic motivations for doing the startup again, you know, when there's a difference in culture or backgrounds, personalities, a lot of these things. Like a motivation for why am I doing this one? Perhaps they never discussed that because they only discussed the product of whatever going to do some.

[00:12:53] Will: Some people want to get rich very fast. Some people are very passionate about this product. They want to kind of build it [00:13:00] no matter what. Even if they run out of cash, they'll still try to do it. So if those motivations are more. Too severe, that definitely leads to conflict. So what really makes this so serious, it could also be, it could be the strategy going forward for the company.

[00:13:18] Will: But what makes this like a serious conflict is that they have not agreed on how to resolve conflict. But I think one of the biggest ways to get out of this is to have a mechanism for resolving conflict.

[00:13:30] Rahul: Yeah. I think, um, person not pulling weight and maybe losing motivation.

[00:13:36] Rahul: These are clearly something that I think. I've seen and also experienced sometimes it could, it could also be because, you know, the motivation just goes away because when things it's high pressure, right? And then sometimes you end up going in a direction where, which is completely different from where you started and why you decided to start [00:14:00] this happen.

[00:14:02] Rahul: Yeah, so how does this affect, I think, I think this just kills the company. Is there any other way to put this?

[00:14:09] Will: Just to add another thing, I mean, to do it, to do a startup has so much risk involved, right? Not everyone has the ability to take risk in their lives. It can come from how they were brought up.

[00:14:23] Will: How wealthy or not wealthy their families were, what they have experienced before, financial responsibilities they have, for example. So, when it becomes, when you come into a state where the company might or might not survive, or you have to cut your salary, or perhaps there's no cash left for your salary.

[00:14:47] Will: The stage as at where, at, at which a founder then kind of basically says, I'm I can't do this anymore. I can't take this anymore. That would be very different among the founders, right? Yeah. And that can also, that, that [00:15:00] of course leads, leads to a lot of conflict, but sorry, you asked me something else.

[00:15:04] Rahul: Yeah. I mean, I, I also wanted to get into this, which I think is, important, the life stage and also the risk appetite of, of a person. And would you say, you know, The background and the childhood as of the person has, has a lot to do with

[00:15:22] Will: this that matters for a lot of things in life, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:15:29] Rahul: That's what I've observed. Yeah.yeah. The thing that I was asking is like, how does this affect the startup? I guess it just kills,

[00:15:37] Will: basically kills the start because there are so many other things to do right then to fight your co founder or to be unhappy. there's 100, 000 other things to do.

[00:15:46] Rahul: Yeah, this is the last thing that you want.

[00:15:48] Rahul: Yeah. And, from a VC perspective, like,Like, how does this impact your investment decision? So this is before investment and after investment Love to know more [00:16:00] and again. Yeah, we were talking about this a study by harvard business review found that startup experiencing internal conflict receive 25 less funding

[00:16:09] Will: Yeah, I don't know what that means because if we see a conflict before we have invested, we will just run faster than Usain Bolt can do his hundred meters and take the train to wherever is first away from that funding team.

[00:16:24] Will: but if it happens after we invest, how to fix our investment appetite, it goes down. Yeah, yeah, but we can, we can talk more about what we do when we see investor or founder conflict. Yeah,

[00:16:38] Rahul: So what do you do? Like you've invested and then you've realized, okay, these guys are having internal conflicts.

[00:16:46] Will: Yeah, I think, um, we understand that if we cannot resolve this conflict, The startup might disappear and we lose all our cash. So we tend to spend a lot of time to try [00:17:00] to solve that conflict. So that's like an emergency in the startup. So. One of the things we tend to do is to, first of all, find out what's going on, then to work with all the founders to figure out how we can solve, and then we try to, together with the founder, find a solution to it.

[00:17:27] Will: I mean, obviously the founders are driving all this. If the founders do not want to get us involved in this, there's no way for us to force us, to force that, right?but most of these conflicts can be resolved and going back to. Something that we are also probably or we're still trying to be better investors, right?

[00:17:49] Will: We're not perfect investors at any time. Um, one thing that I've seen and we are realized lately is that, as I mentioned earlier, this should be a way. [00:18:00] Where the founding team agrees to how to resolve a conflict. So we have one company, the founding team basically had this similar idea as some counselors say about how to have a good marriage, right?

[00:18:13] Will: You should never go to bed with a conflict. Yeah. So they basically had this deal, if they have a conflict. They will not go to sleep until they solve the conflict. And that leads them to sit until like 5, 6 a. m. in the morning debating every topic. So I don't know how they get to sleep in those periods of time, and they probably don't.

[00:18:33] Will: But at least they go forward, right? Yeah. So, so, but, but, this is probably an extreme way of doing that. But if you have a procedure for how to deal with conflict. And then you can say, you know what? We disagree on that. Let's follow what we agreed. Perhaps you go to an offsite or perhaps you take 24 hours out and then you come back together.

[00:18:59] Will: You have a [00:19:00] way to do voting, right? For example, if it's a three founding founder team, you say that if two vote for and one against we go with majority, right? And the last founder should not be unhappy about it.

[00:19:14] Rahul: Yeah. I guess when you're an. Investor, you can't run away from the fact that you're also sort of like a mediator and maybe sometimes a therapist.

[00:19:24] Will: Yeah, but then again, I also cannot avoid saying that sometimes we are not the best mediators and therapists because we are not independent, right? We have an interest in this. Yeah. So if it comes to a point where we want to help the funding team negotiate, we have third party mediators or experts that come in and do it.

[00:19:46] Will: We are not the best people to do that. So who are those

[00:19:49] Rahul: people? Are they advisors or? They can

[00:19:52] Will: be advisors that we know, that we have seen,you know, we have seen them being successful in the past. it can [00:20:00] be different kinds of more experienced people that, that have a passion for, for doing that and tend to, Be able to deep dive into an issue and can both understand the issue and also understand personalities and a little bit of psychology, right?

[00:20:15] Will: So, uh, you mentioned one of your teams, whoever packed where they don't go to sleep before they resolve conflicts. What are the other ways that, you know, founding teams can, do this, like, you know, proactively sort of identify. The potential cause of conflict and resolve them we, we probably haven't spent enough time on this topic.

[00:20:36] Will: I mean, it is basically that you have a, do you have a deal for how to make decisions using voting? If there, if let's say there are two founders, right, this becomes much more complicated than it's like equal, say. And sometimes they can agree on a third person they both trust to come in in those cases and basically leave it up to, to them, [00:21:00] for example, someone they both respect.

[00:21:04] Will: But that's sometimes hard to find. So I don't have a great answer to that. I haven't, I haven't seen a lot of founding teams explicitly agreeing on this. And that's something we should look more into. But yeah.

[00:21:18] Rahul: Okay. I guess one solution is like the governance structure that you put in place, right?

[00:21:23] Rahul: When you start the company, right? But besides that, you know, are there like conflict resolution frameworks or other platforms that can really help maybe some tools?

[00:21:36] Will: I mean, you have the whole system of mediation, right? Which is a very tried and tested sequence. There are professional mediators out there.

[00:21:43] Will: that you can hire and they are professional. So that is something that you often see that in legal agreements as well between companies. but it can also be used between people and between founders.

[00:21:57] Rahul: You know, personally as an investor, what are some [00:22:00] red flags that you look out for? You know, you're, you, you have, a brief period of, time interacting with founders before you have to take a, make a decision.

[00:22:09] Rahul: So what are those? Things that you look for as like a maybe a potential source of future conflicts,

[00:22:16] Will: right? So we, as I, as I mentioned, right, we do spend a lot of time trying to understand the personalities of the founders because that means a lot to us.we tend to sometimes create situations that. are a bit tense sometimes to stress people because we know that people show who they are under stress.

[00:22:40] Will: It's very hard not to show who you are under stress because it's just how the brain works. Um, I guess we try to find out if this is a healthy, balanced team where there is respect. We would, so red flags would be anything that indicates. [00:23:00] Indicates that this is not the case, let's say, it seems like one person decides everything or it seems like I've been in, I've been in pitches where one founder talk down to the other founder

[00:23:15] Will: So this is horrible, right? And obviously we ran away from that, because that's something that, that of course the other founders should never accept that. As a founder, you should never accept being talked down to ever, but that's a clear red flag or a situation where, for example, where, for example, one founder has a hundred percent of equity.

[00:23:37] Will: And the two other founders have been promised perhaps something in the future, again, something that's not acceptable, right? So it just signals that something is off there. There's a lack of fairness. There's a lack of respect. There's a lack of health.

[00:23:51] Rahul: Yeah. Yeah. I've personally seen this there was a startup that you invested in aware.

[00:23:57] Rahul: the introverted builder of [00:24:00] the founding member builder, founding members had lower stake and then you made sure that that's not the case.

[00:24:07] Will: That's right.

[00:24:08] Rahul: So, uh, could you share an example, of a start startup founder conflict that you successfully

[00:24:14] Rahul: resolved?

[00:24:16] Will: Why don't I talk about my own startup ages ago, right when I Yeah. Was a.com founder. So,my conf, my co-founder and I couldn't really agree on a few things. And what we did was that we brought in a CEO.

[00:24:33] Will: Uh,then we brought in another CEO after that again, because the first didn't work out that well.the second one was brought in, by our VC, uh, cause they've, they knew this guy from before. So so that's sometimes a way of resolving it, right, either, getting yet another co founder in or. Perhaps having someone else [00:25:00] to, to run the show, I mean, I didn't have any experience running a company with 50 people.

[00:25:05] Will: I could barely run a company with five people. And I was, I was like 28. I had no idea what I was doing. So, so that's one way of doing that because then a lot of pressure is off, right? And then, We as founders could now focus on what we were good at.and the major decisions had to be made also, including this third guy who basically was, was the one running the show.

[00:25:29] Will: So that's one way of doing it. Yeah.

[00:25:33] Rahul: What are some of the other lessons that you learned during the process of doing this? Because, you know, founders usually also have egos and, oh,

[00:25:41] Will: that, oh, I'm, I dunno how much I wanna say about that. It was obviously very difficult because. It's like having another parent coming in and starting to be the main parent for your baby, which I don't know how you would do that.

[00:25:57] Will: Yeah. You know, it was [00:26:00] very, very difficult. And, and of course the new, the new CEO that came in wouldn't have the same. I mean,

[00:26:17] Will: it wasn't, it wasn't the perfect solution, right? I mean, and no solution is ever perfect. You just want, at least you want to do the best for a company. Probably this wasn't the best for me perhaps as a, as personally, but it was definitely the best for a company. Yeah. And that's another thing that's important when there are conflicts, right?

[00:26:34] Will: It was. Yeah. Often comes from a lack of thinking and putting the company first and not yourself first.

[00:26:45] Rahul: Yeah, this is something that I've recently increasingly realized that if you make decisions in the best interest of the company, it's easier to make decisions. And it's also the best way for everybody.

[00:26:57] Rahul: Yeah,

[00:26:57] Will: and it takes away the ego, right, out [00:27:00] of a decision, for example, which is the biggest obstacle sometimes to a good outcome. Yeah.

[00:27:07] Rahul: On the flip side, yeah, could you also share an example of how you could not maybe share a conflict, founder conflict?

[00:27:17] Will: We had a funny thing. We had two founders that came to us, where the guy that was building the whole thing had a very low ownership stake.

[00:27:30] Will: Yeah. And during that process where we met him, he was vocal about wanting to have a more equal part of the business. The main founder had the idea, but didn't really work full time in the business, which is not a red flag. If you're a founder, right? So that founder couldn't really define how much he worked in the business, but he said, he said, well, why don't you sit down and you find out how much each of us [00:28:00] should own before you invest in us?

[00:28:02] Will: And I thought, foolishly enough that this was a great idea. you know, investors are very happy to be asked to help because, you know, I mean, so we can, you know, do something useful.so I did analyze that. We came back.I suggested that this guy should have a bigger ownership stake, but the other founder, I think, didn't agree to that.

[00:28:26] Will: And basically during. That meeting with us, the founder with the lower stake basically said, you know what, I'm done with this. I launched my own startup. And by the way, you don't have the rights to the code I developed because you didn't sign a, an IP agreement with me because I actually don't have an employment agreement.

[00:28:46] Will: And they were like, just, I mean, I, I wasn't in that exact meeting, but my co founder, Michael, Michael was there.both of these founders then pitched each of their companies in the same meeting and they both [00:29:00] asked if we wanted to invest in them.of course we ran away again faster than the world record.

[00:29:08] Will: Yeah.

[00:29:08] Rahul: And

[00:29:11] Will: the worst thing was that the idea is really good.

[00:29:15] Rahul: Yeah. So

[00:29:16] Will: usually, but I wouldn't say that company fail because I think they both proceeded to launch their companies and actually doing quite well, but that company that they were planning to start here, kind of in the context of those two working together, of course, that broke up.

[00:29:33] Will: And do you think companies will inevitably fail when this happens or, you know, it leads to problems, but it can be fixed.

[00:29:42] Will: I think it is natural to have. Conflict. Yeah. And if you use that to the advantage of the company, it usually can lead to the company improving. Yeah. And to have better decisions being made.

[00:29:54] Will: It's impossible not to have conflicts, but when it, when the conflicts become unhealthy, [00:30:00] when the team doesn't have the depth in their relationship to actually constructively talk about the conflict, if there are deep, deep, deep underlying issues like. personality disorders or, absence of respect, then it's very hard to see the company succeed.

[00:30:20] Rahul: And you mentioned that it's also healthy and, definitely this leads to better decision making because you have varied perspective.and better strategy, especially at early stage, you don't have an option of trying a lot of things. You're strapped for time as well as resources. So this should really help.

[00:30:42] Rahul: But besides that, is there anything else that, uh, good conflicts sort of are good for the startup?

[00:30:49] Will: Yeah, I mean, sometimes the startup can navigate its way to find what I talked about in terms of product market fit. Um, [00:31:00] sometimes the company is actually doing something that is never going to work. So it does require the company to do something quite different or completely different or significantly different.

[00:31:14] Will: So we call that the pivot, right? And to do a pivot is really, really, really hard. And a lot of founders sometimes have an ego or they feel they have. Committed to one strategy because they have talked about it or they would feel it as a failure if they have to change because that means they were wrong in the first place.

[00:31:40] Will: So you have something in your personality where you cannot admit to being wrong. For example, that's very unhealthy and that can lead to conflict, right? And then sometimes, perhaps because of this conflict, the majority of the other founders, or by talking to your co founder, if you are two people, you might actually resolve [00:32:00] that conflict by actually doing that pivot or.

[00:32:03] Will: Basically forcing the non willing founder to actually accept reality because startups are all about accepting reality. I think there are more so if you talk about conflict as a route of failure, I have seen more companies fail because of a lack of accepting reality. Yeah, that's more than 60 or if you say 65 percent of conflicts or companies fail because of that.

[00:32:28] Will: I would say 65 percent perhaps fail because of lack of reality acceptance.

[00:32:33] Rahul: Yeah. It's so true. I have been, you know, guilty of that. I think Jeff Bezos calls this seeking the truth.

[00:32:41] Rahul: yeah, as an investor.are there any other ways that you actively support

[00:32:46] Will: to avoid or to resolve?

[00:32:50] Will: So I think the most important thing we can do is to do preventive measures that [00:33:00] avoid a future conflict. So so one thing we have done.started during COVID is to use personality assessment tools, tries to uncover key motivations behind what you do. So we use a tool called fingerprint for success, Australian startup.

[00:33:19] Will: and they do not focus that much on evaluating people, but more about on how they work together and how the team. So there's a, there's a, there's a one function inside a tool where you can look at individuals, but you can also look at them as a group. And then you can look at potential conflicts, potential, you know, synergies within that group based on the individual profiles.

[00:33:47] Will: That's quite, quite interesting. So it goes to describe how you motivate people, how you convince people. What is important for people and that can be so [00:34:00] different. I mean, I discovered things about myself and my co founder in cocoon that they were quite astonishing. For example, when we that did that internally and what we do is that I don't want to talk about that now, but, What we do when we, when we, when we consider an investment then is that we put ourselves, so we put the lead partner and the lead associates, associate into that group of founders, right?

[00:34:25] Will: Because we're going to form some kind of external team, right? If you're going to work together. And then we see how our personalities will gel with the personalities of the team and we create this cocoon company team. And that's also quite useful.and especially because it sometimes teaches the individual founders something they didn't know about themselves as well.

[00:34:47] Will:

[00:34:47] Rahul: Yeah. Yeah. That's very interesting. I think, not just for the founders and also to have, you know, what the team would look like and what would be the sort of personalities when the team from Cocoon [00:35:00] potentially joins the team. That's very interesting. Um, are there any other tools? Do you think, you know, maybe an AI tool can potentially detect all this before it becomes a major issue and potentially solve?

[00:35:19] Will: I have seen a tool that detects people not telling the truth by analyzing eye movements and voice and so on, right? Yeah. I haven't seen tools that discover more deep issues, but I'm sure that that might come, right? Because anything a human can do, AI can do better, presumably, right? So, in terms of analyzing and meeting with the founders, I'm sure that AI can pick up things.

[00:35:49] Will: I would miss. Yeah, but I haven't, I haven't seen a tool like that at all. No, it could be a future idea for a, for a startup.

[00:35:57] Rahul: Yes. And, is there anything [00:36:00] else, you know, the broader startup ecosystem can do to help, educate? and even help founders when there are conflicts. yeah, before you answer, listening to this podcast might really help, but yeah, besides

[00:36:15] Will: that.

[00:36:16] Will: Sure. Sure. Sure. So one thing I think is improving general mental health and to develop a deeper understanding of yourself and how to improve yourself, I think. when you work with other people, so it comes first with understanding who you are, right? And then understanding who you want to be and then doing something about it.

[00:36:37] Will: That's one thing. The other thing would be to find efficient, healthy, constructive ways to deal with conflict when it happens to basically, as you said before, right? Work on governance in the team, so you kind of prepare for for conflict before it happens. So there's there is not a stigma about [00:37:00] disagreeing because it can lead to a lot of difficult things.

[00:37:03] Will: And you know, if you are two founders, perhaps, yes, perhaps you have a deal with a mediator or already before anything happened because you just want to protect the company. Yeah. And investors, perhaps investors could be better at even asking for that to be in place as part of their due diligence or their list of requirements for a startup before they invest.

[00:37:27] Rahul: Anything that you find, different when compared to maybe Europe or U. S. and Southeast Asia that is either, you know, adding to the problem or?

[00:37:38] Will: yeah, Asia is such a big place with so many different cultures. I, I tend to think that mental health or talking openly about emotions. It's less accepted in Asia than in Europe and the US perhaps, and that can lead to issues, [00:38:00] but hard to say anything else.

[00:38:02] Rahul: So one suggestion again would be like no pick who you want to work with very carefully, right? I don't think a lot of people do that really

[00:38:10] Will: well. Yeah, that's a very good point. That's that's that's that's preparation number one.

[00:38:16] Will: it's already so hard to find a co founder.

[00:38:18] Rahul: Yeah. And now it became even harder.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was great. Well, uh, thank you so much for taking the time to do

[00:38:25] Will: this. My pleasure. It's not an easy topic.