Being founders with friends or family with Jerome Ribot

This is a touching and illuminating conversation with Jerome Ribot, founder of Coglode. Coglode is a startup with a mission to help people make better decisions by making sense of behavioural research. Laurence and I have known Jerome and his brother Anthony for many years.

They actually ran a workshop at our Happy Startup Summercamp nearly 5 years ago, which is coming up again this September and we still have a few places left. At that time we were still all running digital agencies and to be honest Laurence and I looked up to the Ribot brothers and what they had achieved with their agency.

During this episode we talk about Jerome’s journey to launching and growing Coglode and what it meant to his relationship with his old agency, his brother and his now cofounder (and long time friend) Roxy. If you’ve ever shut down or left a company you’ve helped create, or cofounded a business with a close friends or family I think that you’ll definitely get something out of this episode.

Some extracts from this episode:

- Some of the biggest challenges we face are the greatest acts of kindness for our personal development.

- It’s liberating to understand that while you’re not in control of the adverse situations we face we are in control of how respond to them.

- How to sit with discomfort and use that as an opportunity for learning.

- Coglode started off as a website that was built over just a couple of days. It was a marketing tool for the agency.

- I grew an agency with my brother for 10 years and the name of the agency was our surname.

- As a design agency you eventually become a digital surrogate mother constantly pumping out these children (products) that come back to you a little bit damaged.

- I wanted to feel the discomfort of creating a product that we were responsible for.

- As a creative director who’s responsible for creating ideas being detached from your creations is only something you can do for so long.

- And so agency life can only satisfy your needs to a certain level.

- With discomfort comes growth, and so if you have a need to grow as a person you need to seek discomfort It takes a strong mind to distinguish between walking away from your own company from walking a way from your own family.

- When running a startup with a friend your friendship will be put under strain and so you have to protect as much as you can your friendship.

- If you’re very good friends there’s a danger of bringing too much of your personal life to work.

- You need to be honest about why you’re both doing it.

- Knowing that you may, in the short term, lose some aspect of your friendship by tying it to your financial survival.

- You implicitly trust each other You get a closeness that you would’t have otherwise.

- You get to play, explore and be curious together.

- You would never make a decision that would do undue harm to the other.

- Be aware if you start seeing your cofounder friend just as a work colleague.

- Be aware of any creeping resentment to your cofounder. Notice any drops in motivation.

- Are you not being honest about your true feelings?

- Sort out any conflicts about ambiguity of roles as soon as possible.

- Make sure you have time away together away from the business.

Find out more about Coglode here - http://coglode.com