How To Fundraise As A Solo Founder | Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures)

0:00I think the general consensus is that you need to have a co-founder to start a company. And we said, well, but those are also the reasons that most of the companies fail or a lot of companies fail.

0:09Charles Hudson:I mean, I feel like there's so many myths about why people need it. Did you guys do like a deep dive on like debunking a bunch of the myths? Yeah. Well, I'm curious what you think some of the myths are. I think people are like, oh, well, like if you don't have a co-founder, like it's too much work for one person. I'm like, well, startups are a lot of work. And I'm like, look, there's a difference between not having a co-founder and building a startup completely alone. They're not the same thing. And so we spend a lot of time on that. My biggest fear is always, are you doing this by yourself because you're not capable of playing nice with others?

0:37Charles Hudson:And that's always the thing I try to test. But I found that it's better to do something by yourself than it is with some weird shotgun wedding or mishmash co-founders who are not properly situated. Those teams are going to break up. And, you know, I think last time we checked, it was something like between 25 and 30 % of our portfolio companies lose a co-founder before series a yeah so it's a pretty common occurrence for us that we're dealing with these things and sometimes they go smoothly and sometimes they're highly disruptive to the company and i found that oftentimes there's an inverse relationship between how disruptive it is to the company and like how well matched the people were up front so it's just it's just and people say oh you know like who's going to be the sounding board i'm like well, you can build a community of people who can provide you with push, sounding board, feedback, challenge your ideas.

1:30Charles Hudson:That doesn't have to come from your co-founder. One of my friends was like, you know, we stopped talking about co-founders. We start talking about the founding team. What really matters is who is that first core set of five people around the company. And maybe in an AI environment, it's maybe the first two or three people, maybe not five. But I've seen some solo founders just create teams of really highly qualified, well-compensated people where it would have been crazy to call them all co-founders, but they operate like a founding team. You know, there's something that you probably have a great perspective on because you've invested in, I believe, hundreds of companies at this point, maybe even approaching 500.

2:07Charles Hudson:We've done 500 here at Precursor, probably another 150 at Uncork and maybe another 50 at InqTelso's. So you have a great perspective on this that is probably different than a lot of investors who are much more concentrated in terms of just seeing what happens with founding teams and co-founders in particular. And I'm curious, you know, when you think about those companies, I think you said 25 to 30 percent, something like that. They have that split before even the Series A. How many of those companies just get pretty much impaired at that point or have debt equity like that's very significant?

2:38Charles Hudson:It's it's bad. So the debt equity thing is hard. you know we've had a couple of cases and so we do a lot more rigor around making sure we understand vesting schedules where people are in those vesting schedules but we've had people who've left and walked out the door with 20 or 25 percent equity that's really hard to get a new investor excited about we've had other cases where we've had dead equity and we've had to convince the departed co-founder hey just stay put in the next round we will try to find a lead or a set of investors who will buy you out and will rebalance. But these are all things that we're working on that don't create value for the company.

3:14Charles Hudson:They're like in service of solving a problem. In many cases, it's pretty hard. And the irony is in many cases, we've had more departures from technical co-founders than business co-founders. And like my theory is that if you're a technical co-founder, kind of the only two roles that are long-term available to you are managing the team, kind of more VP engineering, or you have to be kind of a very senior technologist, like architect, CTO type. And if you're just a really strong engineer who can neither manage people nor is that senior, I would say your long-term future in the company might be at risk unless you learn other skills along the way.

3:54And that seems to be, there's also an opportunity cost there, right? Because if you like starting things, if you like building things, you might be sort of an, I see an individual contributor at your startup that you built, which might create some weird dynamics around sort of influence within the organization, which I think often happens with sort of the non-lead co-founder. But then there's also this aspect of, what am I really doing? If I'm just sort of a small piece of a big puzzle at this point, even though I might have some influence at the company level, you might just want to go and start something of your own.

4:27because if you're not necessarily a manager of technical talent or you don't even want to do that, it's possible that you might want to just build a company and sort of be somebody who actually leads the entire organization. Do you see that a lot of the co-founder conflicts kind of consist of misalignment of expectations or sort of changing? One thing that was really interesting, I had a conversation with the founder yesterday, we were recording, and they said that they really like their co-founder, but there was a change of direction that they felt they were the CEO that they felt the company really needed to make and they said you know I'm I'm not uh judging you or mad at you if you don't want to make this change with the company but I think that this is a really important change and you need to not just be one one foot in one foot out you need to be 100 % in on the new direction and if you're not again no sweat I'm not you know it's going to be sad if you leave and the person said you know to their credit they said no I'm not I'm not interested in the new change I think you see that happen often where the companies necessarily need to evolve and change direction.

5:31And one of the co-founders is maybe less stoked about that.

5:34Charles Hudson:I'm dealing with this literally right now. I have a company where the CEO has a really strong belief that they need to pivot the business. And I would say it's a lowercase p pivot. It's the same category. It's kind of the same customer, but a different product. And his technical co-founder is vehemently opposed to changing. and I talked to both of them. And my takeaway is the co-founder, while he's attached to the mission, was also very attached to the original product and solution. And the new thing, while it's in the same general vein, is a pretty different product. And this person's like not that into it.

6:08Charles Hudson:So the CEO and I were talking and he goes, well, what do I do? I go, well, you have to figure out if he's really committed to the new direction. If he isn't, I know you want to keep him in the company, but it's probably not going to be good for either one of you to do that. i so we see that a lot the thing i find that's really hard and we try to sniff this out up front but we're not perfect is what we call rivalry which is the i get this call we're like yeah so i have a question i'm like what like i think i should be ceo of the company and i'm like well the company has a ceo it's your co-founder yeah you know i was okay with it in the beginning but like now i have a bunch of questions about his or her leadership and i think i could do a better job and oftentimes the non-CEO co-founder doesn't fully appreciate all of the things that the CEO co-founder is doing whether that's fundraising or investor communications I have found that like rivalry is a hard thing to settle oftentimes it ends up kind of like succession somebody makes a play for the job and like doesn't get it the other one though I would say is by far the most pernicious thing is resentment yeah and I've seen teams where like resentment starts off small people are like oh, my co-founder doesn't listen to my ideas, so they're a little too imperial, or the company's going in directions that I don't believe in, or I feel like my role's getting diminished.

7:26Charles Hudson:And this little seed of resentment grows, and I find that oftentimes the person who's being resented doesn't realize that the person who's feeling the resentment is building this narrative in their head with every little perceived or actual slighter thing that happens. And I have not been able to really bring many teams back from resentment like once you get in that mind state it's really hard to keep working with somebody and i've had some things that got to resentment which turned into an epic blow up we're like screaming yelling match and in both cases the people were like we wish we could have de-escalated this or like gotten to this sooner now it's gotten to a place where we can't work together anymore what do you think investors think when it comes to solo founders obviously there is an increase in solo founders we're going to talk a little bit more about that but I'm curious you've sort of been very open to solo founders for a long time I'm curious sort of what you think maybe other investors don't get or don't like about solo founders if you were to try and make a case for sort of their position I think a couple things one is like it is a lot of responsibility on one person and I think it comes down to this this notion you know people always tell me well such and such thing is a team sport and I'm like okay but what kind of sport golf is a team sport tennis is a team sport but if you're playing singles tennis on a tennis team no one else is going to serve for you no one's going to return a backhand for you like you have to like make your own shots same thing in golf no one's going to putt for you versus soccer which i think is a really different sport where you're probably as good as your weakest player yeah and so i think people throw around a lot of like loose analogies without actually interrogating, like, what do we mean when we say startups are a team sport?

9:11Charles Hudson:I agree, it is very hard to do anything completely by yourself. But I would separate being a solo founder with being a company that only has one employee. I think those are two fundamentally different experiences. And I share people's concerns about teams that start off with one person and never grow or scale because the founder can't attract or retain great people. But that's different than starting off by yourself. And so I think for some reason, a lot of VCs I know, ignore the many cases of co-founders they have that are not well suited, that are not well matched, that break up. For some reason, that's like an acceptable thing.

9:46Charles Hudson:And instead they fix it on the relatively small number of single founders or solo founders worried that what if they have a bad day or what if it's too much for them? Or what if, I think a lot of it comes down to, if I'm charitable, a recognition that starting a company is really hard and it's a lot of work. And maybe it's too much for one person to do alone. You know, I think there's also this aspect of, when you talk about pattern matching and things like that, denominator delusion, which I like to describe, right? This idea that people think, oh, well, many of the best companies have co-founders, but then they fail to look at the denominator of how many failed companies also have co-founders.

10:24And also the reason of the failure is often because of the team not getting along. And obviously there are some really great examples of companies where they had a co-founder it fell apart the company was able to recover the the sort of remaining founder was able to recover and they've gone and been successful but do you really want to put people through that if

10:46Charles Hudson:if you can avoid it i've told a lot of people my preference in life is two really deeply connected tightly coupled co-founders who have a lot of trust and previous experience even those teams can break up and blow up. Sure. But I think maybe that's the platonic ideal. The second best thing, and the third isn't even close, is a really talented solo founder. I would take a really talented solo founder over a mismatched team. And it's interesting, Julie, because increasingly every year I find myself with more preference for solo founders because it's one person to understand. It's one person's idiosyncrasies.

11:24Charles Hudson:It's one person's strengths and weaknesses that I need to understand. And I found myself preferring that over teams where I'm like, do these people really know each other well enough? Do they like each other? Have they figured out how to have conflict? Are they going to stick together? And I've gotten to the place now where I feel like I think I'd rather take the risk of a single person scaling and being good over trying to diagnose the internal dynamics of two people who may or may not actually be on the same page. When you're talking to solo founders, you're trying to understand some of the things that maybe are different things you're trying to understand than when you're looking at two co-founders or three co-founders could you could you go into a little bit of of how you think about that because i think it's really interesting because ultimately there was one thing you spoke about previously which was this idea that it can sometimes be a question of is this person able to attract talent um but then there's also the the question of maybe there are other other sort of tangible items that you're trying to look at when it comes to a solo founder versus people who have multiple companies that have multiple co-founders?

12:30Charles Hudson:I think honestly my biggest fear with solo founders after the can they recruit thing is do they understand the basically emotional journey that they're signing up for? I was talking to two co-founders that I know who've been working there for 11 years and I said how did you guys stay together for 11 years? He goes neither one of us we both never wanted to quit on the same day. And I was like, yeah, that's what you get from a good co-founder. When you're at your low moment, when you kind of want to throw in the towel or you're feeling most discouraged, you really hope that that person's on the opposite side of that curve and that they can pull you up from the depths and convince you to keep going.

13:09Charles Hudson:And vice versa when you're co-founder. And when you're by yourself, I find the amplitude of the ups and downs can feel much greater because the hardest thing is as solo founder and CEO, you're like doubly isolated. On the one hand, you don't have a co-founder that you can partner with. But also, as the CEO, you're always isolated because there's certain things you can't talk to your team about, they're burdens you have to carry. And I always try to figure out, does this person really and truly know what they're signing up for by doing this as a solo founder? And sometimes I find that there are other, like I met a solo founder who's like a long distance runner and I was like that's kind of a good it's weird I'm like that's a solo activity that requires a lot of focus and endurance over a long distance of time at least I know there's like something analogous that you've done in your life that's going to be similar to this journey but it's not a requirement obviously that you are a marathoner or a you know some big cyclist but I'm always looking for clues that this person has gone on these journeys before where they've been by themselves and I worry the most about the people who are like super extroverted super like like having people around and i'm like are you really sure you want to do this by yourself maybe maybe build a team of people around you they don't have to be your co-founders maybe you can share a little bit more about your philosophy in terms of things like the advantages that solo founders have yeah i think one of the principle there are probably two things i think about a lot one of them is kind of like the cultural ethos of the company ends up really reflecting the values and beliefs of that one person because in some ways like they're unalloyed you don't have another person who's trying to contribute and shape it and I think you can get companies that have really strong cultures and values because they're really the embodiment of one person's beliefs the other thing is you just have a lot more equity on the cap table to play with and I think particularly in competitive environments where early talent is thinking about both cash comp equity ownership, but also the feeling of ownership of being one of the early people.

15:10Charles Hudson:And if you're a single founder, the first person you hire is going to have a huge impact on the company you build and on the culture versus if you have two co-founders and you hire three people, that fifth person is still very important. But you've got two co-founders plus two other early employees sitting in front of you. And the amount of equity you can dole out when you as the solo founder own 90 % of the company, it changes the game in terms of the kind of offers you can make to candidates. You know, there's something also really fascinating about this idea of setting culture, right? And if you have two co-founders or if there's a three co-founder company, then you already have some culture established.

15:45But if you're only the only person, you're the sole founder, then ultimately that first person you bring on has probably a high degree of impact on the culture compared to, you know, if that's the fourth person after three co-founders. I'm curious what you've seen with solo founders in terms of just how they've thought about hiring or what they've talked about with you in sort of the early days of building their companies. I know you're very close to a lot of founders that you work with.

16:12Charles Hudson:I think one of the big challenges is figuring out who to hire first as a complement. And sometimes when you have a co-founder, you have a complementary set of skills. They're not just like, oh, I'm business and that person's technical. You can have other complementary skills. It could be around operations. It could be communication style. This person's really good at talking to one type of person. This person connects with a different kind of person. I find with solo founders, it's figuring out like who to hire first and also like what to look for because you're both like building the culture, but also hiring someone who's going to contribute to the culture.

16:44Charles Hudson:And in some ways, I think the solo founder experience is really cool because there's no divide and conquer of their responsibilities. Sometimes you think, oh, well, my co-founder handles hiring and I handle fundraising. My co-founder hires, handles ops, and I handle such and such thing. No, as the solo founder, you have to experience everything. And I feel like when it's done well, a solo founder gets a chance to try his or her hand at a lot more jobs than you would if you had a division of labor. And sometimes people discover, wow, I'm actually much better at recruiting than I would have realized, or wow, I'm much better at sales.

17:18Charles Hudson:Sales tends to be one where people discover, oh, this isn't as hard as I thought I have like a natural talent for this. And because you're the only person in the beginning, you get to try all the jobs. You know, there's something really cool about people who come from outside of tech is that it seems like they don't have this sort of belief around co-founders. I was just talking to a deal from Magic School yesterday, and he's a former high school principal. And he said, there's really no co-principles of high schools. And he said, so for me, it just wasn't very obvious that I should even be thinking about having a co-founder.

17:54So I'm curious sort of what you've seen in terms of the types of people who start companies solo. Have you noticed anything like that, that people are coming from outside and maybe they don't have the preconceived ideas there? Or even people who are starting solo who have come from tech, I'm curious if there are any things about them that kind of stand out. Because it feels like if you've been in tech, you kind of understand that generally speaking, most people have co-founders. So I'm curious if there's any things you've noticed around that.

18:24Charles Hudson:Wow, I haven't thought about this until you brought it up, but we have many more digital health companies that are either started by solo founders or with heavily skewed 90-10, 95-5. And usually that co-founder is brought on because he or she has a medical license or some medical credentials that make running the business easier, but the person's not a day-to-day co-founder in the same way. I do think if you have been indoctrinated in sort of like startup lore, it's been pounded into your head that like companies are started with co-founders. And I told our team like three is the max I can tolerate.

19:01Charles Hudson:If you have more than that, I start questioning like your ability to make decisions and like to cut the line somewhere. But I would say that like many of our non-technical, also we have a bunch of CPG investments. almost all of those companies are solo founded and again like if i'd asked them did you think about having a co-founder they would have given me a blank stare and said well why i wanted to start this business i was ready to go there wasn't another person there that i was going to work i certainly wasn't going to stop and wait around to find a co-founder to build that's interesting is there anything else that you've seen from people who are inside of the tech world that might lend themselves to being more open to to sort of go against the grain yeah i guess if you will because i think there's some aspect of if you understand sort of what the conventional wisdom is and you're willing to sort of immediately go against that for one of the core aspects of how you build the company it feels like there are probably a lot of other downstream decisions that you make about how to run the company that might sort of question convention i find that a lot of the reticence when i talk to people like i meet people who are just like oh i don't have a co-founder but i'm worried that if i don't have one i won't be able to raise money and i'm like oh man which is why i've tried to be more public about our interest in solo founders because i wouldn't want people to give 40 plus percent of their company to someone else just to try to make their fundraise easier that seems like a very weird optimization happens a lot happens a lot and so i oftentimes i'll ask people like well what is it that you think you're going to get from a co-founder and are there other ways to get those things other than by having a co-founder um it's just i do find that like people read what vcs have written and they go to these websites and all they see are these two pictures of the two smiling people standing back to back and i think if you didn't interrogate it you would think that co-founder is the only way but to your point we've had a lot of people who come from outside of tech who also come from tech but not in silicon valley who showed up without a co-founder and in general they think about their businesses from bottoms up and they make a bunch of decisions that are unconventional but they're not doing it to be like contrarian sure they're just doing what they think makes sense and they haven't been subject to the same set of inputs that people who maybe have only worked in the valley have been exposed to you know you're a solo gp you have an amazing team um in fact you have the team continues to grow as you as you continue to raise more funds i think there's an interesting parallel in the sense that you are more maybe more open to solo founders than most because you also have this sort of solo founder ethos a precursor I'm curious sort of how you think about solo and and maybe how how you think that that's kind of been informed by your own experience of kind of being being a solo GP and then there's there's one aspect of this I think is really interesting which is everybody talks about sort of ownership as sort of this thing oh you have a lot of ownership and there's a good reason to talk about it because you ultimately have so much more opportunity to either take on more dilution from investors or uh or incentivize teammates in a different way at a different scale than your competitors who might have who might have uh competing offers yeah the the thing though i think is really interesting about solo that is less talked about is authorship yes um and and ultimately you you're going to have other people who contribute to the story who contribute to what's being built in a really major way but at the at the beginning there is one sole author right and i'm curious how you think about authorship as it relates to all of this i think when i get really excited about backing a first time founder i would authorship is actually the perfect word i have a much longer more jumbled way to describe it there usually is a desire to build something where they have a very specific picture in their own mind about what they want to build and they want to relentlessly pursue it and they are ready to go.

23:10Charles Hudson:And the fact that there aren't others in their network or in their orbit that want to join them on that journey or that they want to allow to join them on that journey does not deter them at all. And it's funny, I think it would be very hypocritical if I as a solo GP were not welcoming to solo founders. But I think for me, authorship was a really important part of starting Precursor. I had a very specific idea in my mind about the kind of firm that I wanted to create, the kind of people we wanted to work with and the amount of money I thought would make sense under that model. And I felt like in order to create the firm I wanted, it had to be mine.

23:47Charles Hudson:It was going to be hard to make these changes in the context of something else. Because as I remind our portfolio companies all the time, most people who are already doing something have found a way to optimize it for themselves. So if you bring in a new optimization, you're going to make them uncomfortable or they're going to say, look, I already set this thing up to work in a very specific way. And so even when I meet solo GPs too, I get really excited when I'm like, oh, this is a person who wants to create something because they believe there's something that needs to exist in the world that does not exist, that they are uniquely situated to create.

24:19It seems like there's this sort of, as we've talked about, this deeply held belief around co-founders, but then you look at sort of things outside of tech companies and there often is more of a sort of a sole director or a sole author. You look at movies, right? Most of them are not co-directed. You look at schools, most of them are not co-principaled. You look at books, most of them are not co-authored. And there are so many incredible people that make, for instance, Harry Potter, right? It's one of the most incredible and important stories. And there have been so many things that have come from it.

24:53And there was ultimately so many people who were involved in making that book, the first book, successful. It wasn't just that she wrote this great story she probably had incredible editors working on this so there's this aspect of of that that i think is really important that it's it's less that you can't make a great company with co-authors obviously you can but i think that what we're trying to say is there is this opportunity to potentially create a different type of company i think that you ultimately do have a slightly

25:24Charles Hudson:different type of company when it's solo founded yeah you do and um i do think there are some times we're having a single unquestioned decision maker when it's time to make a hard decision or when it's time to like figure out do we pivot do we adhere to this principle i think it's easier with a single decision maker i really do um i don't know that that 100 of the time results in a higher quality decision but i think people in my opinion overestimate the value of deliberation in some things and sometimes it's like it's important to have someone who has a really strong point of view and feels empowered to make a unilateral decision on an important thing like that's an important part of leadership yeah so i think that one other thing that i'd be really curious for your take on is sort of how solo founders should think about fundraising yeah you know i think that there's just so much advice out there and i obviously one person's opinion is one person's opinion you have a really good opinion and a really interesting sort of data set and perspective given you've invested in 500 companies or more at this point but I'm curious how you think solo founders should should talk about these things about when they should fundraise and you know ultimately I think there's also this dynamic where some people hear maybe rejection because they're a solo founder.

26:47And my suspicion is very often that some investors might just give the least offensive reason. Correct. For why they're not passing. When it's really just, I don't believe in the company. And the company right now is pretty much just you as a person. And that's a fairly offensive thing to say. And people try to sugarcoat it. And not having a co-founder is a pretty good reason to, inoffensive reason. It's not because of you. it's because of the person who doesn't exist so i'm curious sort of what advice you might have for for founders and um how they should think about facing rejection from investors which generally speaking is most investors will pass most investors will pass companies um i think it's

27:32Charles Hudson:important to understand before you pitch somebody like has this person ever back to solo founder sometimes you just end up in meetings with people who are just like i have a block on solo founders and don't take that person that person has made a decision that's independent of you i think the other thing is and i see less of this i used to meet a lot of solo founders who were very um defensive well i'm a solo founder but don't worry i'm gonna build a huge and i'm like well you're already like putting off defensive vibes if you're a solo founder and it was an intentional decision you shouldn't have to qualify or explain it and definitely don't qualify or explain it until you're asked about it.

28:13Charles Hudson:So I see, I used to see a lot more people trying to apologize for being solo founders or explain it before I'd even flagged it as an issue. I see less of that now, but I do think it's important to talk a little bit to your investors about, well, how are you going to use all of this extra equity that you have to build a world-class team? And in what ways is being solo a superpower? And in many cases, what I find is people are starting something that's meaningful to them and there isn't anybody that they know or are close to who's equally enthusiastic about the idea and would make the ideal partner and so they haven't added that person and so um also if you know you're never going to add a co-founder don't give the wishy well maybe someday just like no that's going to be me we're going to build a team i'm not looking for another co-founder and juliana it's weird now because when i started an adventure co-founder meant something really specific like the person who started with you at the same time that the company is created but we have companies now that are adding like co-founders three years in companies that pivot one founder leaves they bring in a new founder who's the like i saw someone who was the refounding engineer of a company that pivoted i was like wow that's a new one i haven't heard that and i think people are beginning to play with titles a bit because titles have meaning and signal in the ecosystem and in some cases people say this is my co-founder and I'm like, well, you worked on this for five years and this person joined you six months ago.

29:38Charles Hudson:It's great you gave him that title, but in my mind, you two are not the same. There's also this dynamic that emerges sometimes when somebody goes from being an early employee to being made a co-founder sort of retroactively. Sometimes that works really well. Sometimes that's horrifically bad. There's also cases where sometimes investors say, hey, you really should have a co-founder. We're going to invest, but you have to have a co-founder. and that has gone pretty poorly too often. There's one founder, I won't name their name, but I imagine we'll be talking with them at some point. They essentially were told they need to have a co-founder.

30:14They said, great, I'm okay with having a co-founder. I think that I'm not super precious about equity. I wanted to build a really great company. It's a very deeply technical company. And they ended up bringing on a co-founder and CTO. and that uh that that they they really believe that the main reason that that person isn't at the company anymore is not because they didn't want to work at the company or because they didn't have a good relationship but the co-founder title was so stressful to that person wow that if they had just been the cto they believed they would still be at that company and adding a lot of value so i think sometimes there's also this aspect of sometimes you think people want these titles or you think people need these titles but but many times it could actually be an impediment totally yeah so i don't know do you have any experiences with with that where it's maybe a solo founder but they add somebody later or or any you don't have to obviously don't have to name names but i'm curious like if there's anything around that because i've also seen this false start thing where somebody starts with a co-founder and it might be two weeks or two months but they eventually very quickly end up solo i'm curious if you've seen any of that as well and sort of maybe if you if you can sort of diagnose kind of what happened there why why that happened because it seems like that often is a thing that that happens at some point in early startups and i think that honestly at this point because i've talked to so many people for the report that we're doing yeah i feel like maybe somewhere between a quarter and a third of people that i've talked to they're actually like actually i did have a co-founder for a couple of weeks or a couple of months so i'm curious what you see around that we see that a lot sometimes it's

31:55Charles Hudson:disclosed to us up front sometimes we find out in our like first green diligence person's like yeah this person was here but like didn't vest or didn't work out i mean there was like such a rich question i'm trying to figure out where i want to start um i think one of the challenges with these late joining co-founders is you have to do two things that I think are hard. You have to create space in the company for the company, the employees to view that person as a co-founder, which is partially a marketing communications exercise. But the harder part is you have to actually make that person feel like a co-founder.

32:38Charles Hudson:And you have to take decisions that were made without that person before they showed up and find a way to make that person feel like an owner and not just an owner but a co-founder level of ownership where they have but also like in most cases i don't find people bringing on equal co-founders later they're junior co-founders i'm like now you have this like weird dynamic where you've added this person who has a title that means something specific probably to the ears of your employees but with the way that you've done equity and power they're not as powerful as you are but you want them to feel a great deal of ownership and commitment.