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Best business advice I've been given: always make sure there are an odd number of founders so you can always get a resolution to any disagreements.
by forkqueue 18y ago
Best business advice I've been given: always make sure there are an odd number of founders so you can always get a resolution to any disagreements.
- sho 18y agoI heard something similar, but with a slight twist - when any decision is to be made, make sure you have a prime number of deciders, otherwise there is the possibility of deadlock. I think that's from the founder of Sony? He had a lot of cool ideas like that. Not too many companies have 9 founders, though, so I guess your version works well enough for startups.
- smanek 18y agoThat's stupid. Two is prime - which does allow for deadlock. And for odd primes, why are they better than just odds?
- sho 18y agoBecause a group of 9, say, can deadlock into 3 groups of 3. Sorry, I think I was supposed to exclude 2.
- smanek 18y agoFair enough. But, in my experience, most issues that cause deadlock reduce to binary decisions - in which case having an odd number of deciders is sufficient. If you have to account for n-ary decisions, then you can never be to guaranteed to be free from deadlock no matter how many deciders you have (trivially, consider the case where n equals the number of deciders).
- c3o 18y ago...until it turns out two of the three founders tend to agree on most issues, and the third is constantly overruled, feels left out and angrily quits. I don't think it really makes that much of a difference: there are pros and cons to both 2 and 3 founders.