Why Don't I Trust My Cofounder Anymore?
By Dr. Matthew Jones, PsyD, licensed psychologist and cofounder coach
If you don't trust your cofounder anymore, it probably started when you stopped telling them what bothered you and started keeping score instead. One person builds a case, and the other never hears it until it's too late. As a licensed psychologist who has worked with hundreds of founding teams, I've found that the problem is rarely the conflict itself. It's the story each of you has built about the other, and that story is only half the picture. What follows is a Q&A on this topic. I hope you find it useful.
Why have I stopped trusting my cofounder?
You've most likely stopped trusting your cofounder because of the meaning you've assigned to your conflicts, not the conflicts themselves. When there's full trust and respect, disagreement can feel productive, even generative, and each person walks out knowing something they didn't know going in. The same topic, if it feels threatening or destabilizing, goes really badly. It usually shows up first in tonality. The transcript of a meeting can look clean while all these interpersonal frictions are buried in how the message is delivered.
Where do the stories about my cofounder come from?
You build your explanation of your cofounder's behavior from three things: how you understand people in general, your internal model of your cofounder, and a lot of guesses and inferences that fill in the data points you don't have. We're meaning-making machines, and it happens fast and semi-consciously, so it's prone to error and bias. Your picture of them mixes what they've shown you, like how they deliver and how they operate, with expectations you learned from other people growing up, such as whether people are fundamentally reliable or unreliable. That composite is more fixed and rigid than the real person in front of you. They keep changing. Your internal model usually hasn't caught up.
What is my story about my cofounder protecting?
Our stories about the other person are often inherently self-serving: if they're selfish, the implication is that I'm not. I'll give you a personal example. I was parentified at a young age, which made me highly attuned to other people's moods, at times to my own detriment. When I lived in an apartment in Chicago, one unit kept piling trash and boots in the shared hallway instead of taking it to the dumpster. The story in my head was immediate: you guys are selfish. That label let me disavow my own selfishness, because attunement is a source of pride for me. So I'd encourage you to ask what you take pride in and what harsh judgments you hold toward others. There may be shadow material there that hints at what you're protecting in yourself. With cofounders, the same behavior can mean two completely different things depending on your history. If your parents were unreliable and your cofounder drops the ball a few times, you're more likely to conclude they're incompetent. A cofounder with reliable caregivers might see a rough patch they trust you'll turn around. Most stories aren't wrong. They're incomplete and reductive, and they leave out your own part in the dynamic.
Why do my cofounder and I keep having the same fight?
You keep having the same fight because your stories interlock: each person's defense becomes the other person's evidence. Here's an example. Aisha, the CEO, sees her CTO, Tom, as underperforming. She criticizes him and the engineering team, and Tom emotionally withdraws and speaks less in meetings. Now her story is confirmed: Tom lacks commitment and needs to be replaced. Tom's story, that Aisha wants him out, feels truer than ever, when all Aisha wants is more engagement. The researchers Kathleen Kennedy and Emily Pronin (2008) call this the bias-perception conflict spiral: when you see someone who disagrees with you as biased, you get more confrontational, and the more confrontational you become, the more biased you look to them. Between cofounders, the moment you decide their motives are bad, you fight harder and become the bad actor in their story. Sometimes both people disengage instead, decisions stall, and every interaction feels compromised from the start.
What happens when I label my cofounder?
The most dangerous point is when your story about their intent becomes the label for who they are. I recently worked with two senior partners at a law firm. One got labeled as a risk to the firm, and at one point that label fit: he was doing things that could have damaged the firm's reputation. The behavior stopped, but the label didn't. It became the lens his partner used to justify treating him with contempt. Underneath, I'd say the partner who saw himself as the firm's protector was scared, because the firm was tied to his identity, his income and decades of work. Letting go of a story means opening yourself up to getting hurt again. Once a story calcifies, it builds its own gravity through confirmation bias and moves from a label to a verdict, whether that's "you're selfish" or a leading question like "why are you ignoring me?" Either way, you've diagnosed them, you get defensiveness back, and that defensiveness reaffirms your narrative.
How do I know if my story about my cofounder is true?
How intense a story feels and how true it is are two completely separate questions. Intensity is how often the story shows up and how much emotional activation it creates. If you're using the same label frequently and it's upsetting, you're probably stuck in a negative cycle where confirmation bias is stacking up and you're ignoring data points that disprove your theory. Even an accurate diagnosis is still subjective and incomplete. The goal as a cofounding team is to co-author a fuller story than either of you can in isolation. Narrative therapists Michael White and David Epston described thin and thick descriptions. A thin description reduces a person to a problem: she never listens, he's selfish. A thick description includes history, context and what each person cares about. If Dan sees Maya as overly cautious and Maya sees Dan as impulsive, the thick story is that they have different levels of risk tolerance they've never made explicit. Mapped to real business decisions, that tells them when to lean on Maya's caution, when on Dan's speed, and when on a hybrid. Thickening the story together is a lot of what happens in cofounder coaching.
How do I talk to my cofounder about what's bothering me?
You break the story in four moves: state the observation, name the impact, share the story if needed, and update the narrative. Say my cofounder, Mark, interrupted me three times in an all-hands meeting.
First, I write down the shared observable reality, something Mark would agree with: he interrupted me three times. "You're a selfish asshole who doesn't care about my opinion" is not an observation. That's my judgment and my story.
Second, I name the impact with an I-message: "When you interrupted me those three times in the all-hands, I felt frustrated because I value us presenting a united front. Would you be open to syncing more beforehand next time?" If you're Mark, own the impact first and clarify your intent later. That reduces defensiveness.
Third, if the story is eating up too much real estate in my mind, I share it as a story: "Mark, the story I'm telling myself is that you care a lot about what other people think and don't always value my input." That stem reveals the gap between my story and his internal reality.
Fourth, we update the narrative from thin to thick. Maybe Mark felt anxious that the team lacked context, so he interrupted, and we both want to align before the next all-hands because we both care about a united front.
Every month you keep score without saying anything, that story gets harder to change, and the company pays for it in the decisions the two of you aren't making together. If you and your cofounder are stuck in this right now, you can book a call with me at https://calendly.com/cofounderclarity/intro, and we'll look at the stories on both sides of the table.
Author Bio
Dr. Matthew Jones is a licensed psychologist and cofounder coach, founder of Cofounder Clarity, and cofounder of the Institute for Founder Dynamics (founderdynamics.org), a nonprofit advancing the science and standards of cofounder partnerships. He is the author of The Cofounder Effect and has worked with hundreds of founding teams. Watch his videos at youtube.com/@CofounderClarity. The Cofounder Coaching Guide (https://cofounderclarity.com/cofounder-coaching): what cofounder coaching is and how it helps two cofounders rebuild one shared story.