The Co-founder Check
Ten questions on the working relationship most likely to determine whether the company makes it. Adapted from a peer-reviewed conflict scale and decades of research on founding teams, not a content-marketing quiz. No email required to get the result.
Co-founder and early-team problems are the single biggest reason startups fail. Not product, not market. Noam Wasserman's research at Harvard and USC puts the share at around 65%, and the number has held up across later studies. The hard part of that statistic is that co-founder pairs rarely catch the drift until a decision forces it to the surface.
This is a short instrument for catching drift earlier. Six of the ten items are adapted from Karen Jehn's intragroup conflict scale, a widely-used, peer-reviewed measure of task and relationship conflict inside teams. Four are the structural decisions that produce most co-founder blowups: equity, decision rights, exit alignment, and role clarity.
Answer it for yourself first. Then send the link to your co-founder so they can answer it separately. The useful conversation is usually the gap between the two scores, not the scores themselves.
Higher is better. The ten items average to a single number from 0 to 4. It is a reflective starting point, not a verdict on the partnership. Some disagreement is a sign of a living one; the question is about the shape of it.
Instrument: Items 5–10 are adapted from the refined six-item Intragroup Conflict Scale (Jehn, 1995; Pearson, Ensley & Amason, 2002), which distinguishes task conflict from relationship conflict in working teams. Items 1–4 are written by Refactor=EQ, drawn from the structural domains identified in Noam Wasserman's research on founding teams (The Founder's Dilemmas, Princeton University Press, 2012): equity, decision rights, exit alignment, and role clarity.
Citations: Jehn, K. A. (1995). A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of intragroup conflict. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), 256–282. doi.org/10.2307/2393638. · Pearson, A. W., Ensley, M. D., & Amason, A. C. (2002). An assessment and refinement of Jehn's Intragroup Conflict Scale. International Journal of Conflict Management, 13(2), 110–126. · Wasserman, N. (2012). The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Princeton University Press.
This page presents an adapted, ten-item self-assessment with a browser-side scoring layer. It is for reflection, not diagnosis. A score is a starting point for a conversation with your co-founder, a coach, or a therapist, not a replacement for one.
If the gap between your score and your co-founder's is the surprise, that's worth a conversation.
A 15-minute discovery call with us. We work with co-founder pairs as well as solo founders.