You’ve stopped telling your cofounder when something bothers you. Instead, you’re just keeping score: the fundraise that didn’t close, the meeting where they talked over you in front of the entire team. And you’ve already decided why they do it.
That’s exactly how trust between cofounders usually dies: One person builds a case, and the other never hears it until it’s too late.
When trust erodes between cofounders, the cause is usually not the conflict itself. It’s the meaning we assign to it.
When there’s full trust and respect, disagreement can feel productive—even generative. Each person leaves the conversation having learned something they didn’t have in their heads going into it. But when conflict feels threatening or destabilizing, it erodes trust.
Where the Meaning Comes From
We are meaning-making machines. When our cofounder says or does something that hurts, the first thing we try to do is understand why they did it. You build your explanation from three key things: how you understand people in general, your internal model of your cofounder, and a lot of guesses and inferences to fill in the data points you don’t already know.
Because this semiconscious process happens quickly, it’s prone to error and bias. Your picture of them is made up of what they’ve revealed to you—like how they deliver, how they operate, and their reputation—but it mixes with your own history. It creates a composite of who they’ve shown themselves to be and the expectations you learned from others while you were growing up, like whether people are reliable or fundamentally unreliable. That composite is more fixed and rigid than the real person in front of you. They keep changing and evolving. Your internal model usually hasn’t caught up.
When the Stories Interlock
Once a story takes root, it stops being open to change. You and your cofounder each probably have these stories about one another, and the problem is that they interlock. Each person’s defense becomes the other person’s evidence.
Let me give you an example. Aisha, the CEO, sees her CTO, Tom, as underperforming. She criticizes his performance and the performance of the engineering team, and Tom emotionally withdraws. He starts speaking less in meetings. He disengages a little. Now her story is confirmed: Tom lacks commitment and needs to be replaced. Tom’s story is that Aisha wants him out of the company, and that feels truer than at any point in the past, when all Aisha actually wants is more engagement and performance.
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. You become more aggressive and accusatory, and then you become the bad actor in their story. Sometimes both people disengage instead, and decisions stall. Once you’re in that kind of gridlock, every interaction feels compromised from the start.
Co-Authoring a Fuller Story
The goal as a cofounding team is to co-author a fuller, more holistic story than either of you can in isolation. The narrative therapists Michael White and David Epston (1990) 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.
Between cofounders, a lot of the work is thickening the story together. If Dan sees Maya as overly cautious and Maya sees Dan as impulsive, the story they could build together is that they have different levels of risk tolerance they’ve never made explicit. Once they do, they can decide when to lean into Maya’s caution, when to lean into Dan’s speed, and when to use a hybrid.
In practice, I coach cofounders to break the story in four moves. Say my cofounder, Mark, interrupted me three times in an all-hands meeting.
- I state the observation—the shared observable reality Mark would agree with: He interrupted me three times. Not that he’s someone who doesn’t care about my opinion, because that’s my judgment and my story.
- I name the impact with an I-message: “When you interrupted me those three times, I felt frustrated, because I value us presenting a united front. Would you be open to syncing more beforehand next time?” If you’re on the receiving end, own the impact first. You can clarify your intent later.
- If the story is taking 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 usually reveals the gap between my story and his internal reality.
- We update the narrative. Maybe Mark felt anxious that the team lacked context, so he jumped in, and we both want to align before the next all-hands because we both care about presenting a united front.
Every month that 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.
