About Dr. Matthew Jones

matt jones headshot photo
matt jones headshot photo

Dr. Matthew Jones is a licensed psychologist whose full-time specialization is cofounder coaching: working with startup founding teams on the relationship at the center of their company.

He founded Cofounder Clarity in October 2020 after helping two close friends have the conversations they had avoided for years, which saved both their company and their friendship. He has spent the six years since making that result repeatable.

Dr. Jones has worked with 100+ founding teams, from pre-seed through Series C, including teams backed by Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Tiger Global, Techstars and Village Global. He holds a PsyD in Clinical Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and is the author of The Cofounder Effect (2025), a book-length psychological account of cofounder conflict. He is also co-founder of the Institute for Founder Dynamics, a nonprofit building the research and professional standards for this field.

His work has appeared in TIME, Wired, Inc., Business Insider, The Observer, HuffPost, and Psychology Today, where he writes the Scaling Connection column. He has been featured on SiriusXM, the Practical Founders Podcast and numerous founder-focused programs.

What Is Cofounder Coaching?

Cofounder coaching is a professional discipline focused on the working relationship between startup cofounders. It addresses the communication patterns, decision-making dynamics, role clarity issues, and interpersonal tensions that emerge when two or more people share the responsibility of building a company together.

It is not executive coaching. Executive coaching develops individual leaders. Cofounder coaching develops the founding partnership—the relationship between leaders. A founding team can have two individually high-performing people and a structurally dysfunctional working relationship. Individual executive coaching cannot address that. Cofounder coaching does.

It is not therapy. Therapy focuses on an individual’s mental health diagnosis and history. Cofounder coaching focuses on the shared dynamics, communication structures, and relational patterns between cofounders in a business context.

It is not mediation. Mediation resolves discrete, isolated disputes. Cofounder coaching works on the underlying relational architecture that generates conflict—before, during, and after specific disagreements.

What 100+ founding teams reveal

Volume is what turns a specialty into pattern recognition. After 100+ founding teams, Dr. Jones can usually see the shape of a conflict within the first few sessions:

  • Resentment that compounds into emotional debt, because small grievances were never raised

  • Disputes over power, decision rights and equity that look operational but aren't

  • Trust eroded to the point where decisions stall

  • The CEO title everyone agreed to but nobody fully accepted

  • Separations that have to happen without taking the company down

Most teams believe their situation is unique. The details are, but the patterns usually aren't, and the patterns are what can be changed.

The Problem No One Is Measuring

The most cited statistic in the startup world is a ghost. For over 35 years, the claim that "65% of high-potential startups fail due to cofounder conflict" (attributed to Noam Wasserman in his groundbreaking text The Founder’s Dilemmas) has been the foundational "fact" of the industry. It is a misattribution. And once you read where it came from, you will be appalled.

This figure originates from a 1989 study by Gorman & Sahlman. That study did not measure cofounder conflict. It did not interview a single founder. Instead, it surveyed 49 Venture Capitalists, asking them to check boxes on why their portfolio companies failed. The specific box they checked was "Ineffective Senior Management."

We have been building an entire field on a proxy. The 65% figure reflects a VC’s retrospective view of management performance, not the internal relational health of the founding team. As of 2026, the actual rate of failure specifically tied to cofounder conflict has never been formally measured by the industry. The real number is almost certainly higher, but it has remained invisible to empirical science.

The Data Gap

While the industry relied on adjacent research, the crisis of the founder remained unaddressed:

  • Founder Vulnerability: 72% of entrepreneurs experience mental health conditions, compared to 32% of the general population (Freeman, UCSF).

  • The Multi-Founder Norm: 83% of VC-backed startups are built by two or more cofounders (Founder Ownership Report, 2025; 45,000+ startups).

  • Lack of Tooling: No validated instrument exists to measure the health of the founding relationship. The Institute for Founder Dynamics' Cofounder Diagnostic Index is being built and validated to close that gap.

Until now, "cofounder conflict" has been treated as a footnote to organizational psychology or marital dynamics. No peer-reviewed empirical literature existed that treated it as a distinct clinical and professional phenomenon.

By applying unadapted frameworks to the unique, high-pressure context of cofounders, the industry hasn't just been guessing—it has been operating in the dark. We are finally moving from anecdotal "check-box" surveys to a clinical standard of measurement.

The Research Foundation

The frameworks Dr. Jones applies in cofounder coaching are the disciplined translation of robust, empirically validated research traditions into the specific context of founding partnerships.

This is what was missing from the field: someone who understood both the research and the startup context well enough to bridge them.

  • Gottman Method (John & Julie Gottman). The most empirically validated body of relational research available, including the Four Horsemen of relationship breakdown (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) and the longitudinal research predicting which relationships succeed and which dissolve. Dr. Jones is trained in Gottman Methodology and applies these findings directly to cofounder partnerships, where the same predictors of marital dissolution also predict founding team breakdowns.

  • Emotion-Focused Therapy (Sue Johnson). An attachment-based model with strong empirical support for improving relational bonds under distress. EFT identifies how negative interaction cycles—particularly the Pursue-Withdraw pattern—emerge from unmet attachment needs. Dr. Jones applies this framework to the cycles that drive cofounder conflict, particularly where one founder pushes for direct confrontation while the other withdraws.

  • Imago Relationship Therapy (Harville Hendrix & Helen LaKelly Hunt). A structured dialogue framework that surfaces how formative relational experiences shape adult partnership patterns. The Imago Dialogue creates structured communication space that cofounders cannot generate under conflict conditions on their own.

  • Tavistock and Object Relations (Klein, Bion, and the British psychoanalytic tradition). Frameworks for understanding unconscious dynamics in groups and organizations, such as projective identification, splitting, container/contained dynamics. These explain why cofounder conflict is so resistant to operational fixes: many of the most damaging cofounder dynamics operate beneath the level of conscious awareness.

Original Frameworks

Dr. Matthew Jones’s frameworks are designed specifically for diagnosing and resolving cofounder conflict. Each is set out in The Cofounder Effect (2025).

The thesis:

The Cofounder Effect. The cofounding relationship has a powerful influence on founder mental health, company culture and company trajectory.

The method:

The Cofounder Conflict Navigation System™. The coaching method used in every Cofounder Clarity engagement. It moves through three phases: Preparation, Conversation and Repair.

The diagnostic tools within it:

  • The Three Languages Model. Cofounders communicate in three registers: Operational, Psychological and Archetypal. When they're speaking different languages, conflict follows even when both are acting in good faith.

  • The Cofounder Conflict Matrix. A four-quadrant map of how conflict shows up (direct or indirect, professional or personal), plus the Cultural Circle, which captures how it spills into the organization.

  • The Cofounder Satisfaction Index (CSI). A measure of relationship health taken at the start and end of every engagement.

The definition:

Cofounder conflict: "A relational misalignment between two or more founders, resulting in conscious and unconscious distress for one or more team members."

Credentials

  • PsyD, Clinical Psychology — The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

  • MA, Clinical Psychology — The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

  • MA, Counseling Psychology — The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

  • Licensed Psychologist — State of Colorado PSY5386 (active)

  • Gottman Method Training — The Gottman Institute

The Cofounder Effect(2025)

The Cofounder Effect by Dr. Matthew Jones explains how the relationship between founders shapes the mental health, culture and trajectory of a startup. It includes the full Cofounder Conflict Navigation System™ and the tools above, written for founders to use directly.

Get it on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0FH7LM9FR
Read a free 40-page excerpt: https://cofounderclarity.com/excerpt-tools

Institute for Founder Dynamics

Dr. Matthew Jones co-founded the Institute for Founder Dynamics (IFD) with Annie Garofalo of Confidante. IFD is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) (in formation), building what the field has never had: a validated diagnostic instrument, original research on founding teams, and professional standards and training for the people who work with them.

Its first published project is the Cofounder Coach Directory, the first public directory of coaches, therapists and mediators whose work focuses on founding teams: 50+ practitioners across 10+ countries. Its first assessment, the Cofounder Diagnostic Index, launches soon.

Learn more: founderdynamics.org
First tool: cofounderdiagnostics.com

Media, Speaking, and Podcast Appearances

Featured In

Speaking

Selected Podcasts

Trusted By Founders Backed By

  • Y Combinator

  • Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

  • Sequoia Capital

  • Google Ventures

  • Tiger Global

  • Techstars

  • Village Global

Find Dr. Jones Online

“The difference between a founding team that scales and one that fractures is rarely strategy. It's the quality of the relationship underneath it."

Dr. Matthew Jones