There’s much has been written about how to find a co-founder, and how to manage co-founder relationships, but a prominent entrepreneur believes the co-founder relationship has much in common with a relationship most people are familiar with.
“The most successful co founding relationships are very similar to the most successful marriages,” PayPal co-founder Max Levchin said on a podcast. “What I think makes a marriage successful is when you grow vis-a-vis your partner, together. Where you never wake up one morning and say, I’ve outgrown you. I used to be here and you were an equal partner, and now I’ve evolved and you haven’t caught kept up,” he added.
Max Levchin along with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and others had founded PayPal, which had revolutionized online payments during the dot-com boom. The company had been enormously successful, and its acquisition by eBay in 2002 had made its founders enormously wealthy. These founders and early employees have since then gone on to found more than a dozen successful companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, YouTube and LinkedIn, and are collectively known as the PayPal mafia.
Max Levchin says that one of the secrets of PayPal’s success was managing co-founder relationships and mutual respect. “In many ways, my relationship with Peter and my other co founders over the years was one where I always wanted to make sure that Peter thought I did the best I could, because I was always trying to be the best possible co-founder for the guy. Because I could see that he was trying extra hard to do the best he could for me, to impress me,” Levchin says.
He added that the PayPal founders divided responsibilities between them, which led to clear goals for everyone. “We split our responsibilities. (Peter Thiel) said, look, I’m going to make sure the business survives. I’m going to raise money and drive us to the best team. You figure out the tech. And from that point on, my marching orders were always, if there’s a tech thing to solve, I gotta make sure Peter’s really impressed. And I don’t doubt that his point of view had always been, if we ever come up against running out of money, I I got to make sure this guy Max sees that I’m good for my word,” Levchin said.
But Levchin said that it wasn’t as though it was all sunshine and roses. “No person, no relationship is without its warts. There was a time when Peter called me from Japan and told me that if I don’t ship whatever it is we were late on by three months, I can go find myself another co founder. And I hung up on him or he hung up on me. So there were plenty of moments where I was staring the guy down and he was staring me right back,” he added. But they persisted, and eventually PayPal ended up being acquired for $1.5 billion. Levchin has since gone on to found Affirm, which is now worth $15 billion, and Peter Thiel has become a prominent investor, investing in companies like Facebook and playing a big part in Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.