Resentment
Resentment speaks to an imbalance in your relationship.
It's an emotional signal that indicates you’re giving more than you’re getting in return. That you have a need that's currently unknown and unmet.
Resentment can stem from a real imbalance or an imagined one. An example of a real imbalance would be if you own less equity than your cofounder but are doing an equal share of the work and feel resentful about that. An example of an imagined or perceived imbalance would be if you believe you're putting forth more effort than your cofounders are and you feel resentful about that. Most commonly, resentment comes from a combination of real and imagined sources: A founder owns less equity and believes that they're putting forth an outsized effort compared to their cofounders.
Other common sources of resentment are when founders believe they're giving more of their time, money, life, or expertise without getting back their "fair" share of things like recognition, salary, equity, praise, or acknowledgement. Regardless of its source, it's the perceived imbalance of a 'trade' that inspires resentment.
Resentment degrades relationships
As an emotional force, resentment aggressively degrades relationships. It can warp a founder's reality of their situation, of themselves, and of their cofounder. The cofounder who has more equity (to use one example) can very quickly start to take up a lot of headspace in the resentful cofounder’s mind. The resentful cofounder begins to fixate on their cofounder who they perceive as being an incredible jerk as both the source and only savior of their feelings of inequality. In addition to resentment, the resentful cofounder also becomes fixated on their feelings of anger and frustration at the situation. Because they don’t have ‘enough,’ and someone else has ‘it all,’ you have become powerless to solve your problem. Resentment has taken you outside of your locus of control.
In this way, resentment is powerfully toxic emotional quicksand in a relationship. It distorts reality and enfeebles the founder who’s feeling it. In the reality distortion field of resentment, you are the victim of someone else's power. And because your cofounder is perceived as the one who holds all the equity, the say, or the positive praise that you need so much, they therefore hold all the power and leverage in the relationship. When you feel powerless, it’s incredibly difficult to raise a discussion about any actual, real issues at hand.
That’s because when we feel powerless, we also start to become afraid. As angry as you might feel at the imbalance in your relationship, resentful founders often feel too afraid to say anything to find rebalance. You might be afraid that if you speak to the imbalance and seek a change, you might rock the boat too much, or get fired, or lose your visa status, or that something else will go horribly and catastrophically wrong if you do. Your sense of agency, personal power, and confidence has been weakened by resentment so much that you can no longer see clear options to adjust the situation you’re in to better suit your needs.
Unfortunately, this fear and helplessness leaves founders in a very unhappy status quo. What's more, the more work you put into their startup, the more aware you’ll feel of your resentment, the more you’ll angrily fixate on your cofounder, the less you’ll be able to focus clearly on execution, and the more helpless and exhausted you’ll become. Time only intensifies resentment - there's no way to escape it by ignoring it.
Try to imagine working at your highest capacity while feeling resentful. It's pretty hard when so much of your bandwidth is being diverted by your resentment to thoughts and feelings about how unfair your situation is. Try to imagine what it would feel like for your cofounder to (innocently) ask that you fix some small mistake, or check in on the status of a sales lead or bug fix for example. If you harbor even a small amount of resentment, these neutral requests could easily trigger a cascade of irritation, anger, dismissiveness, or defensiveness. Your resentment has multiplied itself into other negative emotions, and now spilled out into your relationship in what should have been an emotionally neutral, easy conversation. And if you react in this way, then naturally your cofounder is likely to get frustrated or defensive in reaction to you, which then serves to confirm your resentful beliefs about them being a jerk. The resentful cycle continues as feelings intensify - now on both sides.
Rebalancing resentment is your responsibility
The biggest mistake resentful cofounders make is to believe that it's the responsibility of their cofounder to rebalance the relationship.
Your resentment will make you think that you need someone or something else to change. Put the locus or control squarely back within yourself.
Resentment is about your needs going unmet, and you are the only person responsible for meeting your needs, especially if you haven't clearly communicated what they are to anyone else. You are responsible for your feelings. You are responsible for your needs. You are responsible for your own perceptions of the world. You are responsible for the amount of time, work, or effort you put forth into your startup. You are responsible for the decision you made to accept the % equity that was offered to you. You are responsible for waking up every day and continuing to work for your startup - or not - and at the same level of intensity - or not. When you outsource any of these responsibilities, you put yourself in a fundamentally more fragile position.
You have to choose to believe that you have the freedom and the power to adjust if necessary, all of these responsibilities.
You have to choose to believe in a version of reality outside of the one resentment has spun up for you. The rich data resentment serves up is that you have a need that's currently not being met. Take that value from this emotion and let the rest pass through you. If you hold onto resentment, it will begin to grow into other feelings (anger, frustration), those feelings will begin to distort your thoughts ("my cofounder is the problem"), and those thoughts will begin to degrade your self image ("I'm helpless to do anything about this.") These are all a sign of resentment taken too far and too deeply into your psychology. Walk it all back by reconnecting with your basic unmet need. Choosing how to meet that need is your next step.
How to rebalance
If you listen to the unmet need your resentment is serving up for you, while remembering that you are fully responsible, and fully capable of seeking to meet that need, options open up for you.
Of course you can talk with your cofounder about how you're feeling - and in fact, I strongly encourage that you do! Of course you can ask your cofounder for there to be more balance - for a more balanced equity split, or a more balanced schedule, or more balanced expectations for your role perhaps. Ultimately, all of these options are your choice. Even if your equity split is unequal (real), you have an equal amount of personal power and agency as your cofounder (perception). Your resentment will try to convince you otherwise. Stop believing it.
I usually recommend founders do two things:
Create a boundary around how much time and effort you feel good about spending on your startup. Resentment almost always come up when founders are past their personal breaking point - they're giving too much and need to learn to give a little less in order to stay motivated in the long-term. Boundaries are a healthy feature of every founder's psychology. Having control over what you give to your startup, and what else you need in your life to nourish, replenish, and give back to you - is a critical aspect of any resentment resolution strategy.
Talk to your cofounders about how you're feeling. I rarely recommend that founders talk to their cofounders about actually switching up their cap table. Doing so is asking for an external solution to an internal problem - that isn't the right tool for the job. Instead, I recommend that founders talk to one another about feeling resentful in order to broadcast the possibility of scaling back their effort slightly to achieve a better internal balance. This rebalancing should rekindle passion, hope, agency, motivation, and purpose for you.
Remember - if you're feeling resentment, that's a signal that you have rebalancing work to do in your own work, life, and heart. Instead of focusing your attention outward on what you need your cofounder change in order to fix your internal feeling state, shift your attention to the changes you need in order to feel good about yourself, your cofounder, and your startup again. To resolve your resentment, be open to the idea that your feelings are due to your perceptions rather than reality. This doesn’t make your feelings any less real, and it doesn’t minimize the need for the relationship to change. If you can accept that your perception is a major driver of your feeling, then that opens up a giant landscape of possibility because ultimately, you can create and recreate your perceptions.
There is a world in which your needs can be met, and in which you have the power to meet them. If you continue believing that your perception is based in reality, and it is *only* about your equity split or some other externally-granted solution, then there are far fewer levers for you (and your cofounder) to pull in resolving it.
