Thibauld on Warpcast

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As part of my "boosted casts" series, I wanted to give a big hat off to my co-founder, @joris (follow him!). Choosing your co-founder is the most impactful decision you can make that can make or break your company. @fairmint is my 3rd startup (🦖 ), so I learned the hard way a thing or two about choosing co-founders :) In this thread, I'll share some stories of my previous ventures, from a co-founder perspective and why I am very happy - even 5 years in - to work with @joris everyday 🤗 I am also recasting this post for those who wonder, "How to find a great co-founder?" 👇 https://warpcast.com/thibauld/0xab070819

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I created my 1st startup at 23. At this time, I thought I was the king of the world: After all, I was a software engineer from a top French engineer school with a degree in corporate finance from a top French business school and an experience in sales in a startup. Combine that all together: how could my company fail, right? Turns out it was a total shitshow; we were 4 co-founders, completely misaligned: The first one had been convinced to join, but he didn't want to join. The second one had been named CEO because of his age and experience, but he turned out to be one of the most toxic people I have ever worked with. The third one was a good manager — a profile you don't need when starting a company. The company exploded within 2 years. I am even surprised it lasted that long! The logo was cool though... but we clearly should have spent less time and money on that 🙈 Back to earth. Strong reality check.

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After a few gigs as a freelancer (specialized in "troubleshooting hard bugs" so that I could charge as much as possible in as little time as possible), I replenished my bank account and created my 2nd startup at 28. This one fared much better! We were one of the very first French B2C startups to raise a significant amount of money (by France standards). 2 co-founders, we went up to 3M MAU, profitable, and sold it in 2014. I loved my co-founder and still have a friendly relationship with him. He was a good friend from my engineering school who also had a strong reality check with his first startup, so we were both hungry, frustrated and with a big ambition. Unfortunately, our skills were too close; we overlapped on many things. We "made it work" more than "it worked" because we learned to work with good intelligence, putting our egos aside, but it wasn't ideal. This one had a cool logo too 😜

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Working full-time in crypto since 2016, I started my 3rd startup at 38: @fairmint 🔥 For Fairmint, we teamed up with @joris, a previous entrepreneur with scars and crazy stories. We knew each other from France and knew what we wanted and did not want. Before teaming up, we went on a one-week retreat in Connecticut to ensure we were aligned and complementary: What is our non-bullshit story in every detail? What lessons did we learn? How do we like to work? What motivates us? What do we expect from Fairmint (which had no name at the time)? How are our strengths complementary? What are our core values, and are they compatible? After spending a full week in the same place, we knew we were a good team and decided to go for it 💪 It's now been 5 years of ups and downs, of hard decisions, of hard talks but also of laughter, of jokes, of many coffees (no beers at Fairmint... only coffee!) and we're still here, growing and strong, focused on the mission 🚀 A great co-founder 🤗

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