Founder conflict is unresolved disagreement between co-founders on strategy, role definitions, equity allocation, decision-making authority, work ethic, interpersonal dynamics, or vision for the company. It ranges in severity from minor disagreements that get resolved through normal conversation to existential conflicts that destroy companies. Founder conflict contributes to roughly 25% of venture-backed startup failures, according to Noam Wasserman's research at Harvard Business School, and remains one of the most-common and least-discussed failure modes in the startup ecosystem. It is the failure mode that founders most often underestimate at formation and the one that creates the most operational damage when it surfaces ...