@rish

people sometimes treat the cofounder relationship like something you can fully design upfront. decision rights, ownership areas, operating norms, conflict resolution, all of that. I understand the impulse. if you are starting a company with someone, it feels responsible to make the implicit stuff explicit. @manan and I never had any of that. when I was thinking about starting a company, the answer was obvious to me: if i'm doing this, i'm doing it with him. he posted once that he did not really want to work on this specific project at the beginning. he wanted to work with me, and because i was working on this, he ended up here too. a lot of our working relationship now is just muscle memory. some things are clearly in my domain, some clearly in his, and there's a middle layer we figure out as we go. that middle layer is where a lot of co-founder relationships probably break. for us, it has worked mostly because we had already spent years working together before starting @neynar. we have had very few moments where one of us had to say, “you need to own this” or “i need to own this.” most of the time, we just know. can't be manufactured. you can write down responsibilities, and you probably should, but the real thing comes from working closely with the right person long enough.

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