Why Do My Cofounder and I Keep Fighting About Strategy?
By: Dr. Matthew Jones, PsyD, licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Cofounder Effect
If you and your cofounder keep fighting about strategy, you change the plan and it's still not resolved, and it feels way more personal than a business disagreement should, the strategy probably isn't the real problem.
You likely have a cofounder agreement covering equity, vesting, and titles, but there's a second agreement between the two of you that nobody wrote down. For the last six years, I've worked exclusively with founding teams as a licensed psychologist, hundreds of them, and I've seen how this second agreement forms in your first few months together, gets strained as the company grows, and can be renegotiated in plain language, starting with one conversation.
What follows is a Q/A on this topic. I hope you find it useful!
What is the unspoken agreement between me and my cofounder?
The unspoken agreement between cofounders is what psychiatrist Henry Dicks called an unconscious working agreement: an unspoken contract built on how each partner's needs and defenses fit together. Dicks, who worked at London's Tavistock Clinic, described it in his 1967 book Marital Tensions. He called the way partners build and hold these agreements together collusion, and it happens largely outside of your awareness. When founders describe choosing their cofounder, they often talk about that click. The shared vision, the complementary skills. But part of that click is your unconscious needs meshing. Everyone gets something from the agreement, and everyone keeps it going. It feels natural, and it works for a while, until it doesn't.
What does an unspoken cofounder agreement look like, and why does it break?
An unspoken cofounder agreement is a set of roles and trade-offs that everyone acts on and nobody says out loud, and it breaks because the people inside it keep growing. A good friend of mine joined a company with two other entrepreneurs who were about 20 years his senior and had already made their millions. He was young and trying to get his first million. The deal, and none of this was said, was that he would sit below them in the power dynamic and their opinions would carry more weight. They would mentor him, and he would translate their ideas into something actionable and develop the product. They got to feel valued and respected as mentors. He got to learn from them, so he passed up other opportunities and deferred income. Two or three years in, he had internalized how they thought and started developing his own opinions. He was also carrying a disproportionate operational load, and he started pushing back on what he saw as their outdated go-to-market thinking. Your unspoken agreements have to grow and evolve with the company in the same way your equity does.
Why do we argue about strategy when the real issue is something else?
The fight shows up in business language because that is often the only language a partnership uses. In my book, The Cofounder Effect, I describe the three languages that all founders speak: operational, psychological, and archetypal. Operational language is the language of business, your KPIs, your OKRs, your actual tasks, and it's the default setting of most founding teams. Psychological language is the language of emotion, your internal and interpersonal dynamics. It's slower and requires more awareness. Archetypal language is the language of the unconscious. It's the vibe, what psychoanalysis calls intersubjectivity, the relational field between the two of you. You know the difference between a team where one plus one equals five and one where you're walking on eggshells. My friend and his partners argued about strategy and product direction when the real shift was in power, and that lived in the psychological and archetypal dimensions. Naming it requires vulnerability and guarantees some discomfort, so teams stay in operational language, where the conflict can't get resolved.
Why does my cofounder seem to feel betrayed when I push back?
When an unspoken agreement is out of date, the same strained agreement can feel like disappointment on one side and betrayal on the other. If you're the one who's outgrown it, you often feel narrow and constricted in how you can show up. You start to question whether the relationship is even worth your time, you probably stop giving feedback, and the emotional debt compounds until you leave the company. If you're on the other side, it can feel like your cofounder is breaking the deal. You may be unconsciously feeling the loss of something you never even admitted you needed, like being looked up to. When my friend did push back, it was operational, not psychological. He never named the elephant in the room, the power dynamic, and it didn't land. Ultimately he left, and the company lost the person carrying the disproportionate load of the day-to-day work. That was a lose-lose for everyone.
How do I know if an unspoken agreement is behind our conflict?
The clearest signal is when your emotional reaction is way bigger than the issue itself. If you're ruminating, spinning out, and venting to everyone who will listen, something below the surface is asking to be updated. It reminds me of the two mountains metaphor from acceptance and commitment therapy. From across the valley, I can see your path more clearly than my own, but inside a cofounder partnership you're climbing the same mountain. That's why someone on the outside, like a coach or a therapist, can help make explicit the dynamics that are, for now, like water to a fish. You can also start with a few reflective questions. What assumptions did you make about working with your cofounder when you started the company? How were you expecting them to show up, in energy, emotional support, and ownership?
How do I start the conversation to renegotiate our unspoken agreement?
You renegotiate an unspoken agreement in four steps: set the agenda, name what's changed for you, ask what they're noticing, and change how the two of you decide. Start by setting the agenda. Use a meeting you already have or create a new one, and set a clear frame. For my friend, it might have sounded like this: "As we keep growing the business, we're having a lot of disagreements about how to scale. I'd love to talk about that and some of the other changes I see in our partnership, and hear what you're noticing. Is that something you're up for?" That frame names both the business and personal issues and makes this a collaboration, not a decree. Then name what's changed for you, in the first person and without clinical language. You're not a therapist, and you don't need to be. My friend might have said, "In the beginning, I felt incredibly lucky to be working with you. I've learned so much from you, and as the business has grown, so have I. I have stronger opinions now, and I question decisions I used to just accept. I know that's created some friction on your end." No jargon and no labels, but the shift in the power dynamic is named.
What do we do after the conversation to change how we make decisions?
After you've named what's changed, ask what your cofounder is noticing, then change how the two of you make decisions. Asking can be as simple as, "Have you noticed that too? What's it been like on your end?" That invites collaboration and more ownership from you. You might hear that when you push back, they experience you as dismissive or defensive, and realize your unspoken resentment is showing up in those moments. Listen with curiosity. Acknowledge it, apologize for your part, and then rethink the decision-making. Clarify who has final say in each domain, run a few experiments, and go from there. The agreement itself may stay partly unconscious, but what becomes explicit is the shift between how you used to relate and how you want to relate moving forward, and that is what you can operationalize into business process. Then put it in writing. In The Cofounder Effect, I include a Partnership Term Sheet, a document where cofounders make their relational patterns, expectations, communication norms, and decision-making explicit. Treat it as seriously as your financing term sheet, and review it every year.
Every strategic fight that's really about an old unspoken agreement is time you're spending on the wrong problem. Name what's changed between you, and your strategic disagreements can get back to being about strategy.
The Partnership Term Sheet and the full framework are in The Cofounder Effect (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH7LM9FR), and if you'd like help having this conversation with your cofounder, you can book an exploratory call at cofounderclarity.com.
Dr. Matthew Jones is a licensed clinical psychologist, Gottman-trained, and the author of The Cofounder Effect. For the last six years he has worked exclusively with cofounding teams, helping founders diagnose, navigate, and fix the most important relationship in their startup. Learn more at cofounderclarity.com or watch his videos on YouTube at youtube.com/@CofounderClarity.