 Thank you for showing up. I was secretly hoping that nobody would. Before I begin, I want to apologize for my voice. I usually don't sound like this. And it's not because of the questionable amount of tequila shots that we had last night in honor of Slush. It happened, like, within the first 30 minutes of me setting foot in Helsinki. I'm from Turkey, clearly not built for this weather, but, again, apologize for the voice, but hopefully it's not going to bother you too much. RMCs did a great job of introducing me. I'm Rena Onor, co-founder, CEO of Spike Games. But I've been in gaming for the past, like, 13, 14 years of my life. I started my first company, Peak, when I was 24 years old. And this new company about three years ago, but it's been a great journey. And happy to share some of my learnings about managing co-founder relationships, picking them, keeping them, sometimes getting rid of them, or being, you know, getting rid of myself through these years. So let's begin. So on the screen, you see my co-founders at Peak. So we're five people, which is not very common in a lot of the startups that you're going to see. But this was a very deliberate and very intentional choice. And the reason was, with my previous company, Peak Games, which commercially was a massive success coming out of Turkey, it was acquired by Zynga for about $2 billion, which was unheard of from, you know, compared to where we're from. But we started off with six people. And within the first six months, only the two of us were left, me and Siddharth. So it was a very, very difficult decision and very difficult process to actually start with a lot of people, with expectations around support and commitment and workload, and then, you know, find yourself in a completely different scenario and situation in a very short span of time. Wait, clicker is not working. Sorry. All right. So what is a co-founder was the main question that I ran into when we were first building Peak, because we weren't very deliberate in our choice of getting together the types of people that we needed, what we wanted out of the company. So it is basically a partner commitment. This is going to be a long journey. Some journeys are shorter than others, but it's a very tough marriage, even harder than marriage. So there are going to be your partners in succession and also in failure. And that's very important to remember, because failures are going to be bigger in number compared to your successes. And hopefully, the types of people that you choose to embark on this journey with have the capacity to have significant impact on your business, you know, positively and negatively. Obviously, we want the positive impact, but we have to understand that whoever you embark on this journey with can make or break your business. So do you need a co-founder? I get this question a lot from people who are just starting off, who have big personas. They look to the news and see the idolized figures like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Sam Altman who look alone, right? All of these people had co-founders, but it's very natural for press or for the external world to focus on these single, really charismatic, omnipresent founders that, you know, looks from an outside have no support system. So many companies are built with solo founders, but they're more others that are built with large co-founding teams. 75% of the unicorns today have more than one co-founder, so they're built with groups. And two founder teams or above have a 15% more chance of raising funding within a 90-day period of starting. So these are the facts that point to, you know, the strength of having a good co-founder relationship and multiple people to start on this journey with. But why do you need a co-founder? Surpasses these metrics. Based on my experience personally of having operated two different companies across a span of a decade and more, I have identified three reasons why having a strong foundational co-founding team helps. The first thing is you can actually divide and conquer. So the quantity of work you put out increases. So imagine you're a co-founder focused on a certain area of your business, product or service. You're either focused on the tech, the sales, the marketing, the product. So if you have other people who are as focused and committed in taking care of another aspect of your business, you actually can get done more in a short amount of time compared to trying to do it all by yourself. Not only the quantity of work, but the quality of work increases as well. You might be a spectacular individual who is multifaceted and multidisciplinary enough to be able to do a couple of things at the same time. You might be very good with product and tech and marketing. But if you try to do all of them at the same time, probably you're going to do a mediocre job at best at each. So by dividing and conquering, you not only get done more, but you do it better. And the support system. I think nobody talks about it in our personal lives. We have different support systems, either friends or family. But for anybody who's run a startup or has been an operational role or is thinking about it, you know that this is going to be a long journey. It's going to be an arduous journey. It's going to be depressing at times and very emotionally tolling. So it's not as easy to talk about these things with your parents, with your family, with your friends who've never been in your shoes, who've never experienced anything similar. But walking through that road with people who know exactly what you're talking about and are feeling and seeing similar things as you are, it's an incredible support system that you will need because you're going to fall down and you're going to need other people to pick you up from time to time and do it to them when the time comes. So how does it help? It actually does help besides the quantity and the quality of the work and the support system. It helps you set the culture. What is culture in an early state startup? It's not a piece of paper you print out with ten disciplines or amendments you print on it and then you plaster it all over your office. That's not that. Culture is a set of shared values and way of doing things that is so innate to everybody in your team that even when you're not there, everybody follows those principles and lives by them and executes their work in the same manner. In the early days, culture is the people. And in the early days, the people is the co-founders. Before you make a single hire, it's the co-founders who are there in the first place, you know, chugging and hustling and getting the work done but also setting the culture. It's also fundamental in your ability to attract talent. This is going to be a huge issue. This is something we struggled with at peak when some of our co-founders left early. Then all of a sudden, the people who were left behind were equipped with the task of trying to enlarge this team with skill sets that we weren't experts in ourselves. So this helps you not get the best talent but to retain them and to inspire them. Because in early stages, you don't convince the talent because you have a lot of money, but you convince them because you make them believe in a mission. And for them to believe in this mission, they have to believe in the people who are going to help them execute. They have to respect and they really have to like the people that they're going to work with. And having a really foundational, strong co-founding team helps you make these recruits and make these first hires that are going to set the course for your startup or your business in the years to come in a very effective manner. The shared responsibility. It is a tough job. And trying to carry all of that weight by yourself is an unsurmountable task. Physically, mentally, psychologically, all of it. So the fact that having multiple people where you can share the responsibility of building the business, hiring and then finding your first clients, fundraising, all of that is an amazing thing. So it's like the running joke is, we're so confident that even if the rest of the team leaves and it's only the five of us, we can churn out a game, right? We have our CTO, we have our marketer, we have our product person, we have our artist. So even if everybody left, we could do it. Might slower, but we could still do it. So that gives you an incredible level of confidence in the decisions you make and takes the stress off. So that's an amazing thing that we have this shared responsibility that life goes on when I'm out here talking to you guys or out in the US fundraising for weeks long and take time away from work, but life goes on, things get done because I have my co-founders holding down the fort when I'm not there. In addition to the internal things that we talked about, externally, it's also an incredible early indicator of success. When you're an early stage startup and you're trying to raise your pre-seed or seed round and you don't have much to show to the external world like VCs or even hires, your product is really early, it's a janky prototype, you don't have a ton of data to show or a track record, the story of the co-founding team and their track record and their execution ability is the single most dominant factor in helping you raise the funding that you need, which is again going to be instrumental in running your business down the road. So okay, now that we've established my opinion on whether it's good or bad to have a co-founding team and why, so how do we start the selection of the process of selection? I think it starts with introspection first and which is what we did with Spike. I think before you ask very important questions to the people you're going to be walking hand in hand, you have to ask yourself some really hard questions and you might not like the answers that you hear internally. So what do you want long term? It's very natural for a lot of these founders that you meet or you see on events or you read about to always talk about impact and passion and that being the most important thing. That's not always the case, guys, when people start businesses. Some people care about more things, like some things more than others. For some, it's about the financial opportunity. For others, it's about impact. For somebody else, it might be about creating the biggest X of Y so that they stick it to their old boss and create something that's bigger. It's about competition. So everybody's motivated and wired differently. So you have to ask yourself, why are you in this? Why do you want to do it? And be really honest with yourself. Not only you have to decide what you want to achieve, what your true motivation and North Star is in building this business, you have to also understand and think about how you want to achieve it. Meaning, do you want to blitz scale and raise a hundred million dollars and do it fast and furious? Or do you want to be deliberate and slow and do it at your own pace, not caring about competition? Do you want to work 24-7, burning yourself to the ground? Or do you have a family to take care of and you want to have more of a work-life balance? Do you want to work from the office or do you want to work in a distributed manner? So starting from the very top to the very minute detail, you have to realize and figure out what you want and how you want to achieve that thing that you want. And then the third thing I think you have to ask after figuring out your motivations and incentives is who can help you get there? What are you good at yourself? And how can you be helped? And if there are shortcomings that you can identify in yourself, can you fulfill that with the people that you're going to pair up with? Okay, this clicker is not working with me. So what to look for in a co-founder? Is there shared history? So one of the things that made Spike very interesting to a lot of investors and new hires in the first place, and our emcees told that we did this monster seed round, $55 million before the world economically went to shit, so it was a different period, but it was all in all very large at the global scale. And we did this mostly pre-product, pre-revenue. The reason it happened was because four out of the five co-founders that Spike were XP games members, and we'd known each other for many, many years. My co-founder, CPO, was the first-ever product manager that we hired at peak. I was his first interview right out of college. There was no particular reason why we hired him, besides the fact that he was incredibly smart, but we stayed together for many years, and he led some of our most successful products. Similar story with our CTO. He was the third-ever mobile engineer we ever hired, worked with me on studios that were commercially successful and unsuccessful. There were so many learnings we had gone through in reaching commercial success, a complete failure. So is there shared history? Is that a big point? Do you know them as human beings? Meaning you might think that you know somebody in a short amount of time, but unless your relationship has been stress tested with some sort of a conflict or an existential problem, most probably you don't really know what that person is like. So it's really important to try to understand the character and the personality of this person that you're dealing with, because no matter how skilled they are, and they might be amazing at their job, at the human level, if you can't get around and get along with these people, then you're going to have major problems down the road. And this ties into the temperament. How are they individually? How are they in a group? How are they in happy times? How are they in bad times? How do they handle stress? How do they communicate when they're stressed? Are they okay to disagree and agree to disagree and move on or do they hold a grudge? A lot of these things, guys, are going to change the quality of your life as a founder and potentially make sure whether your co-founding relationship lasts or breaks apart, like many teams face. Motivation. I keep coming back to this, but this is huge, because if you are in it for the money and your co-founder is in it for the impact, you're going to have a lot of opportunities to fulfill your motivation, but your co-founder, he or she, is not going to agree with you and that's going to cause friction and a divide in the decision-making and the strategy that you guys are taking. It's not possible for individuals to be completely on the same page, but at least being honest about what you want and what you expect early on before you're in a position where you have to make an instant decision and it's friction-full is very important. Commitment. I think everybody expects when you start a business that the people that you started with are going to be as committed to the business, to the lifestyle. They're going to be as in love with it as you are, but believe it or not, especially over time, levels of commitment, both physical and emotional change. I've had past co-founders who were very vocal about saying this company is my baby, literally comes before my actual baby and my wife's okay with it. So that's a personal choice. I think I could say that when I was a 24-year-old starting peak and I didn't have a family yet. Now in my lifetime, having a 5-year-old daughter, I would never say that. I wouldn't judge anybody for feeling or thinking or living it, but that's not my motivation. That's not how I operate at the moment. Now, my life and my identity isn't only defined by what I do and what I'm trying to achieve. I'm trying to get more of a balance, and that's okay, but we have to be honest with each other about how we feel about these things. Preferences. Again, this feels like a minute point, but after COVID, I think it has come to play into the way we want to work from hours to days of the week to remote or an office. All of these things take a toll on you because if you have a co-founder, who wants to spend seven days of the week in the office working day and night, all in it together, making sure that they break their back to make that next sprint, but the other person is happy going home at 6 p.m. to make sure that they have a family dinner, then that's going to create a problem. If you haven't been honest from the beginning this is what you want and you're okay with the other person's preferences. Not everybody has to be on the same page, but everybody has to understand what everybody wants and be okay with it. Shared values and Nord Star. A lot of companies have different cultures and ways of doing work and different communication styles. Some companies in San Francisco, you walk in and it feels like a fraternity. Some others are very corporate and very process-oriented and very deliberate. You have to figure out what your value is. How do you want to treat your bigger team? What's important to you? Is it product? Is it customers? Is it your team? Is it your investors? Who do you report to as a human being? Some of these conversations you have to have before you actually move forward. What skills to look for in a co-founder? Obviously, expertise because it helps if they have experience and a track record and something to show for in coming into this job and doing what you expect them to do. Obviously, they need to be able to reduce the burden. My goal as a CEO co-founder is always to be not the smartest person in the room. I'm happy to be the dumbest person in the room where people in the same room as me, who we've hired are smarter, more talented, have more experience and expertise and they have the ability to make an impact. So, basically, you're looking for some people or a group of people who are going to be able to help you execute and take the load off of your shoulders. Whether it's product development, whether it's sales, whether it's fundraising or hiring or setting the culture, they have to take some work off of your shoulders. And this ties into division of responsibility. I think it's very important to have a conversation about boundaries, what each person is going to do, what's expected of them, how much initiative they have, how much freedom they have in executing. And the reason it's important is in early stages of a startup, especially when the teams are small and the resources are finite, a lot of the co-founders wear multiple hats and you find yourself doing this and that and the lines get blurred into what is whose responsibility. But as the company grows, I think that needs to change because as a CEO, if you keep finding yourself interfering into the minute decision-making process of your CTO, ranging from process management and speed of hiring and speed of shipping, then there's going to be trouble because you've hired or you've started this journey with this amazing person that has expertise, can create impact, but if you're not giving them the freedom to operate because the lines of responsibility, those lines have blurred, then it's going to create tension and problem and probably help you not execute your best. And then again, execution ability. Don't want to create any offense for anybody, but there was a running joke starting from peak, now select spike is never hire an ex-McKinsey. I love them. I love talking with them. I love sharing ideas with them and looking at slides, but I like working with them, right? It's a different mentality. We're more gritty. We just get shit done. Mistakes are less important for us. We don't feel as paralyzed about the consequences of what's going to happen two years down the road because we care about tomorrow or the next week because it's that survival mentality. So execution ability, regardless of smart or accomplished in a corporate world somebody is, you want people that get stuff done. Again, what skills to look for? Trust. Obviously, trust, transparency, open communication. If you can't have this with the people you're working with, if you're walking on eggshells from the moment you start that you can't feel you can express your true thoughts and beliefs and happily disagree, get into arguments and discuss, if you can't have that, then that relationship isn't going to work because the first problem that you face, the first friction you face, it's going to be the first scar and it's going to keep building from that until to the point that it breaks. Reaction to volatility. This is very important. There were amazing people out there who built amazing careers in top companies, the FANGs and with structure and thousands of people to share the responsibility with. And there it's more predictable. Processes are set in place. There's a strategy that comes from the top and they just execute to perfection. But a startup, we don't have as much clarity. Our life changes in the blink of an eye. I work with my brother and my husband gets to experience our conversations quite often and he's a CEO of his own and he says of an old family business, I've never seen highs as high as yours and lows as low as yours in the shortest span of time. That is how we're wired because otherwise we wouldn't be able to operate. We get so high because we need the superhuman energy to be able to continue in the face of adversity. And then we run a marathon like a sprint and then we kind of burn out emotionally, feel a really low. We have to pick each other up in that point and then keep doing it all over again. So it's a very volatile world and the way that they react to that mentally and physically is really, really important. Resolution of conflict, you're going to have fights, you're going to have big discussions that are going to be fundamental, that might break your business. So are you going to break up art as the co-founding team because you can't agree or you can't move on if a decision has been made to resolve it? That's what makes great companies from mediocre to good companies. Recognize each other's contribution. We're all human, we all have egos, we all want to feel appreciated at some point and everybody's doing their best. So from time to time, take the opportunity to recognize each other's contribution and say, because of you, that we're here, that because of you we've finished this quarter and we're going to be working on the sales guidelines, et cetera. So another important thing is what you need in day one is not the same as what you might need in day thousand, right? Our companies grow, they evolve. So if we can't evolve with it, then it's going to be a problem. So you might be very good working as an engineer in a three person team like coding your way through it and ripping and shipping your product, but what happens when that three person engineering team is now 300 people or more? Do you have the ability to empower people other than you, people who might be better than you? Do you have the ability to retain the talent because convincing them and hiring them and bringing them on is one thing, but you have to create the type of environment that they choose to stay, you know, time and time again in the face of adversity and volatility because you give them something and that is only possible with the types of leaders, co-founders that grow with the business and continue to inspire and empower. Are you able to execute and help others execute? Or are you lost in your thoughts and strategies and just can't deliver? This is very important because as the company gets bigger, it gets slower. This happens to everybody. Processes get in place, everything's cleaned up, but product isn't shipping as fast as it used to when you were just 15 people. So can you just keep pushing the boundaries and keep shipping? Are you able to kind of weather the inevitable storms because there are going to be a lot of problems? Are you going to just fall out, give up and say, that's it, throwing the towel, or are you going to be able to get back up? We're to find them. I get this question a lot. Obviously, we talked about working with people you know well, so it could be from corporate projects, from your company, you've worked with them in your department and another department, and you loved it so much that it was the best experience of your life that you could see yourself working with them again. It could be academic projects because it might be the first thing you do out of college, or this could be somebody you worked on an open source project with, or a school project, something, or you try to find people with shared interests. So you go to developer meetups, you contribute to open source projects and try to meet like-minded people, or you attend hackathons, or you go to investor mashups and meetups or conferences like this, but the point is you're trying to find somebody who leaves an impact, a significant impact on you that you go back and say, I wish I could work with that person again. So the laundry list. It's been great with time, by the way. So have you spent structured time with these people? So have you worked on something together? Have you spent unstructured time? So have you gotten the chance to know these people as actual human beings? Have you had a conflict together, and how did you resolve it, basically? Have you talked about roles and areas of responsibility? What you expect from that person and what you expect them to do have you actually identified those boundaries? Have you discussed your long-term goals what motivates you? What's your North Star? What is it that you want to achieve with this business? Have you talked about your values and your vision and the way to get to that mission and North Star? Have you discussed your working styles and preferences? Is it going to be a problem when somebody works their ass off and the other one is having a lifestyle career? Communication style. How do you resolve conflict? Do you set predetermined times to actually check in with yourself actively even when there's nothing to discuss? Or do you start talking to each other as soon as there's a problem? And when you start talking, how do you talk? What are the rules of engagement? And just give yourself a predetermined checklist of times to check in with each other. Whether there's something wrong, whether everything is right, just make sure that you check in. You refresh this list sometimes rediscuss because preferences and ideas and motivations change. But good luck to each and every one of you. Hopefully you guys find as amazing co-founders as I was lucky to find because without them I think we would be nothing. Again, thank you so much for joining today and have a lovely slush.