MotionThink

Andrew Chen moved to San Francisco from New York with a clear goal: to start and run his own technology company. After spending a couple of years meeting people in the industry and learning about tech trends, he joined a startup accelerator funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's venture capital firm, Innovation Endeavors. The program had an unusual structure: founders applied without pre-committed co-founders and participated in a "co-founder dating" process to match up with potential teammates.

Once teams were formed, Andrew and his co-founders went through a need-finding and design-thinking process to identify a startup idea. They settled on building productivity tools for freelancers. Over the course of six months, the team prototyped many different products, starting with customer interviews. "Almost everyone said finding new clients/customers was a huge pain point; many also said getting paid on time by clients/customers was a pain point," Andrew recalled. They built stubbed-out prototypes in Photoshop and HTML/JavaScript without real data, using them to simulate product ideas and gather feedback from potential users. This design-feedback-iterate loop generated learnings, but also revealed deeper problems.

As the team got to know each other through building, fundamental differences emerged. "Differences in opinion among the co-founders also quickly emerged, both in terms of business direction and in terms of what our goals were for doing the startup. These differing views soon became too big to ignore and, eventually, too big to proceed with." After six months, it became clear the founders were not aligned on a shared vision, and they were spending more time debating and arguing than building. "It would take multiple units of discussion for every unit of work output, and in the early days of a startup, that ratio should be the mirror opposite." The company never achieved revenue and had burned through approximately $100,000 in seed funding. Andrew resigned as CEO, and his co-founders tried to continue for another month before unwinding the company entirely.

Andrew identified the root cause as a structural flaw in the accelerator program itself: requiring solo applicants without pre-formed teams. "This stands in stark contrast to every other major incubator that just about requires your founding team to already be formed – and to have been working together for a long time and, ideally, to already have some demonstrated traction – before you apply." The accelerator program itself failed after just two batches, validating this approach. Andrew's main takeaway: "The #1 reason startups fail is because the founders quit or break up, resulting in startup suicide. This is what happened to us." He emphasized that while business ideas and products will pivot dramatically, people don't change. Therefore, knowing your co-founders well before committing is essential—"it really is like marrying someone."