The Friday meeting is designed to create alignment at the company level. It's important that there's alignment because if there isn't, then they come to a head in a really ugly way and a really powerful way. The first one we start with is what are your recent observations about the business? Those questions are designed to step back and observe outside of your own world a little bit.
Our guests are Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger, co-founders of Labelbox.
In this interview, we take a microscope to their co-founder DNA, exploring the ins and outs of how they’ve made the relationship work over the years. We discuss:
- How Manu and Brian came together as co-founders and landed on the idea for Labelbox.
- How they intentionally aligned their skillsets, values and responsibilities before writing a line of code.
- Their rituals for spending valuable time together as the company grows, including thought-starter questions for deep discussions and sharing an executive coach.
- How they run the executive team at scale and sketch out decision rights.
Manu and Brian both have extremely valuable advice to other founders, either those in the early stages of looking for a co-founder, or folks who want to add a little magic to an existing co-founding relationship.
You can follow Manu at @manuaero and Brian at @RiegerB on Twitter.
You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson