The State of Cofounder Coaching: Why This Emerging Field Holds the Key to Startup Success
Six years ago, when I started doing cofounder coaching, I genuinely thought I was the only one doing this kind of work. I didn’t know anyone else focusing specifically on cofounding teams. It felt like the most important relationship in business, and yet, no one seemed to be talking about it. I couldn’t find any other coaches online who worked in this space. Over time, I found a handful of others (maybe ten), and some weren’t even doing it full time.
Today, that’s no longer the case. I’ve connected with more than 30 coaches who focus on cofounders, and every year, more people reach out to me for supervision, coming from either business or therapeutic backgrounds. That growth excites me. Because I still believe the cofounder relationship is the most important and most precarious relationship in a startup.
It’s the blueprint for culture. It defines how a team communicates, how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, how trust is earned or eroded. The quality of that relationship sets both the floor and ceiling for the company’s potential. And at the same time, if mismanaged, it can become an existential threat. There’s no other relationship in business with that same polarity: it can be the thing that makes a company successful or the very thing that breaks it apart.
That’s why I named my forthcoming book The Cofounder Effect, to capture the powerful and pervasive impact that cofounder relationships have on a startup’s trajectory, shaping the mental health of founders, the culture within the company, and ultimately, the success or failure of the business.
What Cofounder Coaching Is (and Isn’t)
Cofounder coaching is still an emerging field, and one of the most pressing issues is that there is no shared definition, no unified community of practice, no standard of training or supervision. That lack of cohesion is part of what limits the field’s legitimacy, but it also reflects how interdisciplinary and nuanced this work is.
Some coaches come from the operator world. They’ve founded startups, led teams, built and exited companies. Others, like me, come from a background in psychology. We approach this work with frameworks around emotional process, relational systems, and human behavior. And then there are many others in between.
That diversity is a strength, but it also creates confusion. If we want to legitimize cofounder coaching as a discipline, we need clearer boundaries and definitions. To start: cofounder coaching is not therapy, not facilitation, not mediation, and not traditional executive coaching.
It’s not therapy because therapy often lacks business context. Founders who work with therapists often feel like they got emotional insight without any operational change.
It’s not facilitation because facilitation often doesn’t go deep enough. It risks staying surface-level, avoiding the psychological roots of tension or conflict.
It’s not mediation because mediation typically happens after a decision to part ways has been made. Coaching often comes earlier, while there’s still a chance to repair or realign.
And it’s not traditional executive coaching, which usually happens one-on-one. Cofounder coaching focuses on the relationship between founders. It’s dyadic or triadic. That distinction matters.
Cofounder coaching sits at the intersection of all of these disciplines, but with a specific focus on helping founders improve how they relate, communicate, and lead together.
Dual Accountability: The Business and the Relationship
One of the core distinctions of cofounder coaching is that it operates on two levels simultaneously: the relationship and the business. In couples therapy, the relationship itself is the client. In cofounder coaching, the relationship is part of the work, but the business context is inseparable.
In practice, that means we’re working on things like equity, roles, decision-making frameworks, and co-CEO dynamics, but through the lens of how those business structures reflect or reinforce relational dynamics. I don’t believe you can separate the two.
Often, there are deep emotional needs or psychological patterns driving dysfunction. One founder might be conflict-avoidant, the other reactive. One might be unclear about boundaries; the other might be frustrated by a lack of ownership. But underneath all of that is a relational dance that needs to be understood and reshaped.
And when that dance changes—when the emotional and relational patterns start to shift—the business usually shifts with it. Better communication leads to better decisions. More containment leads to more clarity. Less resentment means more energy for product, team, and strategy.
This is why I believe cofounder coaching should begin with the emotional and relational work. If we jump straight into business structure without resolving the emotional patterns beneath, we’re just rearranging the furniture while the foundation is cracked.
Core Competencies and Theoretical Foundations
In my view, effective cofounder coaches need fluency in both psychology and business. That includes:
Systems theory
Couples therapy modalities (EFT, Gottman, Imago, etc.)
Conflict resolution
Organizational psychology
Narrative therapy and co-authoring frameworks
A deep understanding of startup dynamics: fundraising, product cycles, leadership roles, equity, and scaling
This is not just about insight or advice. It’s about helping cofounders build new patterns together. It’s experiential, dynamic, and strategic.
Myths and Blind Spots in the Field
There are a few common misconceptions I see in the field:
Operator-turned-coaches often underestimate the emotional complexity of the cofounder relationship. Without deeper psychological training, they risk missing the real root of dysfunction.
Therapists often miss the business context. They might help the relationship but fail to translate that into organizational or structural change.
The idea that "relationship vs. business" is a real tradeoff is false. If one founder wants out, that’s a business decision too. Trying to force someone to stay creates more harm.
Emotional debt is real and accumulates over time. Avoiding hard conversations might protect short-term output but creates long-term damage.
The best coaching addresses both layers. It brings alignment, clarity, containment, and repair—which are all business-critical outcomes.
Supervision, Ethics, and Standardization
This work is emotionally taxing and ethically complex. It’s easy to get triangulated or to collude with a cofounder’s defenses. Without supervision, coaches risk reinforcing the very patterns they’re trying to shift.
We need peer supervision models. We need shared ethical standards. And we need training programs that integrate psychological insight with business literacy.
Barriers to Growth and Opportunities Ahead
Despite the importance of this work, the field still struggles to gain widespread recognition. Part of that is cultural: many investors and founders still unconsciously privilege execution over emotion. The startup world inherited a Cartesian bias that says emotion is separate from logic, and it’s simply not true.
Part of the problem is also structural. Many VCs don’t feel incentivized to invest in improving team dynamics across the portfolio, because one breakout return covers the losses. And part of it is on us: the coaches. We haven’t done a good enough job defining this field, articulating its value, or collecting data to demonstrate impact.
That can change. We need to define core competencies. We need to build research partnerships. We need to create language and tools that make this work legible to funders, founders, and the broader business ecosystem.
The Path Forward
Cofounder coaching is still in its early stages as a field. But it holds the potential to become a cornerstone of founder development and startup success. If we can unify the field, standardize training, build research partnerships, and tell better stories about the value of this work, we can help define a new profession.
It’s not just a niche service. It’s a necessary discipline. And I’m committed to helping shape it.