Today I’m talking to a founder who heeded outside pressures that told him he needed a co-founder to get to the next level—which in his case, meant securing institutional funding.

So he found a co-founder by looking for someone with the most compatible skillset. Makes sense, right? But what he failed to account for were factors like mission-alignment, long-term commitment, and the realities of startup life for a first-time founder.

In this episode, we retrace the qualities that make a “good” co-founder and dig into the less conventional way of building a founding team without the all-or-nothing approach of the traditional co-founder relationship.