Everybody fights.
After coaching thousands of YC startups, I can say that pretty confidently: Every founding team experiences conflict.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to engage in tough conversations with your cofounder. When founders don’t know how to navigate conflict, they build relationship debt by accruing bits of unspoken resentments, judgments, assumptions, or feelings within the relationship. Too much relationship debt turns little things into explosive arguments. It causes a pervasive feeling of miscommunication and mistrust. And it’s also inefficient. Relationship debt will rust out the foundation of your relationship and slow down your execution until your cofounder relationship fails and your startup dies.
This is totally optional. And unnecessary.
Startups are derisked when their cofounders learn how to communicate openly, honestly, and clearly with one another. Relationship debt is cleared - and trust is built - when cofounders learn how to have a “level 3 conversation” - a truly honest conversation that surfaces the thoughts and feelings that are difficult, but critical to share with your cofounder.
Founders scale in relationship when they learn how to deploy the level 3 conversation, communicate openly, listen, find resolution, and quickly get back to building.
Navigating conflict well is a mission-critical skill for every startup founder. This Group Office Hours will teach you how.
What You’ll Learn:
How to stop your startup from dying because of your poor communication skills
What relationship debt is and how to pay it down
How to use conflict as a way to clear relationship debt and strengthen your cofounder relationship
A script you can use to initiate a level 3 conversations
Strategies to minimize defensiveness
Advice on how to communicate effectively about emotionally sensitive topics
We’ll cover several use cases and so you feel confident deploying these skills in your cofounder relationship right away
Q&A for you to bring your tough conversations to workshop alongside other ambitious founders
Your Host
Amy is a licensed psychotherapist who was hired as Y Combinator’s first Batch Director and became YC’s in-house Founder Coach. While running and scaling the YC batches, she coached nearly 1000 early-stage founders at YC, and she’s coached nearly 1000 later-stage founders since launching The Founder Coach in 2019.
Guidelines
We keep each others’ secrets safe.
The foundation of Group Office Hours is trust: By signing up, we commit to keeping each others’ secrets safe. Confidentiality is what allows founders to open up and get the support they need from this time together. We all commit to maintaining the trust and confidentiality of the group in order to sustain it.
If you share content or information from Group Office Hours with a person or organization who did not participate in the event, you and your entire startup will be neverlisted from all The Founder Coach products, services, offerings, and events going forward. Any tickets you’ve purchased will be forfeited and you will not be refunded.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
Group Office Hours is only for startup founders.
We are exclusive to startup founders in order to create an environment of connection, mutuality, emotional safety, and shared understanding.
The invitation to Group Office Hours does not extend to investors, coaches, journalists, execs, startup employees, etc. If you are not a founder and try to attend a Group Office Hours, you will be removed from the call and neverlisted from all The Founder Coach products, services, offerings, and events going forward. Any tickets you’ve purchased to future events will be forfeited and you will not be refunded.