Bad Startup Partners

This slide has the name of the company in big bold letters.

Bad startup partners. The good the bad and the irrelevant investors vs. If your partner doesnt respect your other employees it will spell misery for the latter and put a cloud over the entire office. Investors want to protect their interest and in order to do so they need to.

Strategic partners on the other hand obviously care more about protecting themselves than the success of a smaller company. It will likely require some time for your partner to think through the ramifications of your proposal. Communication is so critical to maintaining a viable partnership.

Before you drink the partner kool aid here is a list of the top ten worst business partners for your start up along with some tips to help you avoid this cast of characters. Sitting down over lunch or coffee could be a good place to start. Not only that but to put it bluntly its bad for business.

A change of venue from your typical meeting might be helpful. It can be anywhere from thankful to downright hostile. Its a wrong partnership.

Typically the name of the company looks like an almost random sequence of letters and sometimes numbers that no one can pronounce. Wanting to start a business because you hate your job or you believe that you can become wealthy can be great motivating factors but blind you to the realities of owning and running a business. Pitfalls abound when entrepreneurs decide to become partners.

Potential partners particularly those entering into their first business venture need to be realistic about the business prospects and temper their. When partners get so busy doing their own thing that they cant find time to sit down with the others they will likely start to feel less engaged. So in traditional top ten format the top ten terrible horrible very bad slides cover slide.

Here are six ways to spot a bad business partner from the beginning and how you can potentially make more educated decisions about how you want to move forward. Be prepared for whatever response comes back to you. If youve raised money from angels or vcs chances are that your salary will be governed to some degree by your agreement with them.

Know what they are ahead of time so you can set up guidelines that allow people to walk away if things go wrong. An unresolved issue can also lead to partners being unable to talk about certain things. As sabet adds this can lead to bad deal terms for the startup.