This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I think the era of the “Part-time, multi-company cofounder” is coming
With this I mean that you will see more and more startup cofounders that are multi-hatting at 2 or more companies.
The reasons are simple:
1- Risk diversification
2- We are getting better and better at asynch work
3- When focusing only on the key strategic tasks… most co-founder roles are part-time by nature.
Have you ever asked an experienced angel investor… “Why don’t you invest in just a single company?”
After all they can spend lots of time getting to know the founders and choosing the perfect one.
The answer you will likely get is… “No. That would be stupid.”
An experienced angel investor will always seek to diversify into at least 10 investments.
And yet co-founders are expected to be completely undiversified with the rationale being that they need to be working far more than full-time to make something successful.
But i’m sorry… having seen lots of early stage startups, I just don’t agree.
For example does an early stage startup of say 10 people need a full-time CTO or CMO?
Rarely.
And if they have one… i challenge you to track what that person actually does for an entire week.
It will be lots of stuff that probably could have been done by someone far more junior or perhaps didn’t need to be done at all.
And it’s the ones that truly are busy 100% of the time that you should be very worried about.
Because if they’re staying so busy on tasks that they need to be doing at such small scale… are they truly going to be able to scale?
Having seen a few folks like this in action.. i can already tell you the answer to that question is “NO”.
So… i think in ten years it’s gonna be completely normal that even a majority of the co-founder team is working on multiple startups with the intention of going all-in on the one that proves to have the best PMF.
Why? Because it just makes sense.
