Should You Start a Company With Your Friends?

There’s a good chance that if you were to start a company right now, that your business partners would be your closest and most trustworthy friends. And there’s also a good chance that your business might not might make it for the long haul and that it might leave behind some residual damage. I’ll say now, friends are great, and startups fail often times, it’s just a part of the process. The first startup that I co-founded was essentially me and my close friends, and we ran that startup for 3 years without losing a single member of the team.

But having gone through it once already, if you were to ask me again whether I would choose to create another startup with friends? I would probably have to decline the offer. And there’s more than a few reasons for that. Starting with the most obvious one.

It’s just too casual

There’s no going around this. Regardless of how you think you will behave if your friends aren’t pulling their weight, odds are that you probably won’t bring it up. They’re your friends after all. And you can probably let things slide a few times before you consider bringing it up.

And if you ever do bring it up one day after months of holding it in, then odds are things will get awkward and a proper solution probably won’t be found, but instead you’ll make up for…