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Question: What is one tip for organizing co-founder roles and responsibilities, and aligning co-founder job descriptions among founders?

The following answers regarding how to balance responsibilities, lay out co-founder job descriptions, and define co-founder roles and responsibilities are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC).

Embrace Co-Founder Job Descriptions

Co-founders are vital to the business but can get lost as the company evolves. We evaluate our co-founder job descriptions yearly to ensure that the written expectations are in line with the work the company needs done. Don’t be afraid to reassign co-founder roles and responsibilities so that business goals can be met.

— Robby Hill
HillSouth

Track Tasks

You shou...

I sent the following letter to our entire team at Airbnb.

Hey team,

Our next team meeting is dedicated to Core Values, which are essential to building our culture. It occurred to me that before this meeting, I should write you a short letter on why culture is so important to Joe, Nate, and me.

After we closed our Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, we invited him to our office. This was late last year, and we were in the Berlin room showing him various metrics. Midway through the conversation, I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us.

He replied, “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

This wasn’t what we were expecting from someone who just gave us $150 million. I asked him to elaborate on this. He said one of the r...

When Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann introduced himself to Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber turned on his heel and uttered the now-infamous words, “See you in the trenches.”

On the surface, the Silicon Valley feud seems misplaced: Postmates is a logistics company that connects couriers and consumers, and Uber’s bread and butter is transportation for humans.

But Uber has been trying to establish its own competing delivery service, and both companies are using big brands to fuel their explosive growth. Uber has partnered with the NFL, Capital One, and Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Postmates recently inked deals with Starbucks, Chipotle Mexican Grill, McDonald’s, and Apple.

Pursuing big brands has been a smart way for Uber to expose more ...

Shopping for personal auto insurance can be a pain, and it only gets more difficult when you’re shopping for your business. It’s almost like playing a game of chess against Bobby Fischer: No matter what you do or say, you still feel like you’re going to lose.

So how can you make it easier? When researching auto insurance options for your business, the first road you should take is one you’ve already been down. Start by investigating the provider you currently use for personal home, auto, and general business liability insurance.

Providers love to offer discounted monthly premiums to people who bundle accounts with them, and while commercial and consumer auto policies are two completely different animals, most companies provide both.

Get add...

When a well-known brand like IBM or Nike is recruiting new people, they don’t only have the advantage of the brand but also of high salaries and good perks. An employee signing up at Microsoft essentially gets paid while learning and building up a good CV. And if she would want to leave later, she is well-positioned.

As a startup, you have to compete with this, with no initial brand, no impressive salaries, and no perks. Therefore, you need to deliver something else. What you can deliver is a superior culture.

Culture is one aspect where it should be easy for startups to compete with big corporations. Because startups are small and young, they can be innovative, flexible, fast-moving, and fun. They can be more grounded in their values and b...

Michel Feaster is not a woman you’d expect to be scared of anything. Her company, Usermind, is taking on the massive market of customer relationship management (CRM) software by providing a truly personalized customer service experience. Their focus? Millennials.

“Millennials have zero tolerance for companies that are not personalized,” Michel tells Startups.co. “Pretty much every business is facing this world where they’re going to win these hearts and ears — or someone else is going to win the Millennials.”

But Usermind isn’t Michel’s first time on the startup merry-go-round. Her first foray into the startup world was as employee #19 at Apptio. She joined Apptio with the goal of learning firsthand the ins and outs of building a company fr...

We're going to update our financial statements using a simple accounting process that requires zero professional accounting experience or accounting software — it's just our income statement spreadsheet.

Click here to download our template to follow along.

The next step after we've captured all of our financial transactions in our spreadsheet accounting system will be to process each of the financial records in order. Earlier we began recording transactions from our bank accounts and credit card statements, so now we'll drop them into the Tabs we set aside for business expenses and revenue.

What Tabs will we Populate?

We've broken our spreadsheet accounting system into a handful of useful tabs to populate.

Here's the quick list, then we'll go ov...

Our most broken assumption in Year 1 is that anyone will stick around for Year 2.

Spoiler Alert: They won't, and the cost of giving away a ton of equity and responsibility to people who won't be around for long is incredibly expensive.

I see this play out all the time, especially with First Time Founders who naively think that everyone who promised to help launch their startup in Year One will actually stick around to do it. It’s easy to make that mistake — when everyone’s talking a big game and acting just as excited as we are to build something amazing, we can’t help but believe them.

But all of a sudden, people stop showing up. That Co-Founder CTO whom we thought was going to build the whole product for "free" goes MIA. That mentor who ...

Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

• Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch

• Part 2 - Market Size

• Part 3 - Revenue Model

• Part 4 - Operating Model

• Part 5 - Customer Definition

• Part 6 - Customer Acquisition

• Part 7 - Funding

• Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets

• Part 9 - Traction ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

Let’s dive in!

Startup Traction is your opportunity to tell investors how far you've taken the business up until this point. Just having a great idea is wonderful, but generating traction is what truly differentiates you from the pack. Especially in the early days, the only thing better than traction is more traction.

Traction Sets You Apart...

I’ve covered Max Levchin and the Web properties he’s built pretty much since I arrived in Silicon Valley in the peak of the dot com bubble. In fact, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing him for my first book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0.” I continually try to get him on stage— despite having plumbed so many of his thoughts for so long— because he’s genuinely one of my favorite people to interview.

Not only does he have one of those iconic immigrant stories that should convince everyone why immigrants make this country stronger, but unlike so many other wealthy success stories, he’s never forgotten where he came from and what it felt like to be an outsider with nothing. Nothi...