How to Co-found A Startup With Someone You’ve Never Met

The story of a founder and co-founder who met remotely and ended up launching a startup

Starting a business with someone is always an arduous process. There are contracts. There are differences in personal values and backgrounds. There are questions of trust, personality clashes, and sacrifices that have to be made.

But starting a business with someone you’ve never actually shaken hands with changes the game completely.

Given our virtually unlimited ability to meet people around the world in today’s global and tech-powered economy, it’s becoming less and less uncommon that two people in two different countries can come together and launch a business together.

Launching a business is different from remote hiring and contracting, which we know is a growing trend. See, employment is de-risked. The employer is stable and established (we hope). The employee or contractor receives a paycheck and/or benefits. Remote workers do a regular job, remotely.

Entrepreneurship has all the risk, with more unknowns, more pressure, and more work, and less pay, if any, at the start. And benefits? What are those?

Add in the dynamic of being fully remote and entrepreneurship can be uniquely challenging. If you think entrepreneurship is hard enough with a partner you’ve known for years, try it with a partner you’ve only just met on the internet who lives in another timezone.

Being a remote co-founder isn’t half bad

I’ve just gone through this process with my business partner Johnny and our company Hopin. It turns out it’s not that bad at all. In fact, it could be argued that remote entrepreneurship is easier than centralized entrepreneurship and as I mentioned before, we’re probably going to see more of it. Regardless, as with anything, there are pros and cons.

Today, Hopin is a team of 14 remote employees building version 2.0 of our live online events platform. But just like any new company, Hopin started at ground zero. It was just Johnny in London and later me in Richmond. Two years ago we were total strangers.

Have calls in the early mornings and late evenings — you’ll see different sides of each other.

How two strangers built a company together

Johnny is the founder, coder, and visionary behind our startup. He started working on Hopin in 2018 and built the MVP. I’m the writing, marketing, and sales Swiss Army knife who joined Hopin as cofounder in 2019.

The first time we met was via a typical introduction over email. I was interviewing the super-connector founder of a very large Slack community for an article and he fired off a number of quick one-line email introductions at the end of our phone call. One of them was to Johnny.

Johnny and I jumped on an initial video call. It was a typical what-are-you-working-on conversation that ended on a let’s-see-where-this-goes and stay-in-touch note.

A month later we hopped onto another video call. It was a typical check-in. We chatted about new updates from both sides. Good stuff. A couple weeks later, another check-in. A few weeks after that, another.

Each time we spoke, Johnny had made updates to Hopin and he asked me to test these new features with him. I was curious about the platform and I thought it would work well with my Medium publication’s audience. So I obliged.

Despite my blossoming freelance career, when Johnny asked me what I saw myself doing as a career in the long run, it dawned on me that I did not want to keep freelancing. Hopin was a product and a market I could plunge into with two feet. So after over a month of back-and-forth negotiating, we put our agreement into a contract in September 2019 and signed. I quit my client work completely and joined Johnny as his full-time co-founder.

I still had not met Johnny in person. As a commemoration of our agreement, I booked a flight to London the next month on my own dime.

It was mildly surreal to meet in person. When you have long and intense conversations with someone you’ve never physically been in the same room with — about family, worldviews, morality, health, and money — the relationship deepens. But then, when you meet that person for the first time in real life, there’s a palpable sense of starting over. We were physically strangers but familiar companions at the same time.

I spent five days in London. We worked, we went out to eat, we worked more. By the time I left, we were already talking about when I would return. Over the next few months up to today, it has continued to be a great match. Of course, we’ve not been without our disagreements, mistakes, and misaligned expectations, but at a core level, there’s something unassailable about our partnership, something that transcends the doubts and absence caused by distance. This has remained so as we’ve hired more people and the company has scaled.

How to be a successful remote co-founder

If I were to put my experience into some takeaways for others who are looking to do the same thing, I’d say this about starting a business with someone you’ve never met:

Put in the time to get to know each other. Don’t jump in too early. You don’t want to apply undue pressure on your partner or yourself before the proper trust is there to bear it. But don’t hold back until it’s too late. Really get to know each other. Be open. Let the conversations leave the world of projects and let it get personal.

Once, Johnny and I discussed a personal topic for over three hours on one call. It was heated at moments but it proved to both of us we can communicate soundly amid disagreement, a key trait for partners. It’s important to know how someone views the world, not just how they view work, as they are inseparable. Be flexible enough to get on calls that are both scheduled and spur-of-the-moment. Have calls in the early mornings and late evenings — you’ll see different sides of each other. Ask questions that have an edge of randomness or friendly confrontation to them. The best questions start with why — they can illuminate how someone reasons. Communication like this is necessary when the only way you meet someone is through the same webcam.

In the end, there’s always risk. But entrepreneurship is inherently risky; this version of it only adds an extra layer of unknowns. If that’s the con, the pro is that there is a healthy separation that centralized entrepreneurs don’t get to have. Instead of living close together, such as sharing a flat in San Francisco and absorbing each others’ lives to the point of social suffocation and peer overload, there’s space and balance. For us, this provides a boost in productivity and an efficient collectedness when we do touch base.

In the end, the rules of starting a business are changing. You no longer need to shake hands, meet for coffee, or share an office to form a company with someone. With today’s video conferencing and remote work tools, you can meet anyone across the world and grow enough trust to even quit your job and jump into a startup venture together. If someone asked me if I would do another non-remote co-founder arrangement again after this, I would say yes — in a heartbeat.

Why limit your opportunities and possibilities to the city you live in?

Dave Schools is a Cofounder at Hopin an online events platform where you can create engaging online events that connect people around the globe.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer.
He could be contacted at udohrapulu@gmail.com

Tags: Co-found a startup, Cofounder at Hopin, Dave Schools

Afrikan Heroes