- Running a tech startup often involves a lot of rejection, long hours, and financial risk.
- Some cofounders go to couples therapy to learn how to navigate conflict.
- They say therapy improved their company culture as well as their personal lives.
About two years after founding Karat in 2019, Will Kim and Eric Wei's LA-based fintech startup was doing really well. They snagged a spot in Y Combinator's 2020 accelerator. In 2021, they raised $26 million in Series A funding.
It was the perfect time to see a therapist together.
"I call him my therapy daddy," Kim, 29, told Business Insider of Wei, his friend and cofounder. "He was the one who really got me started on this therapy thing."
Kim first tried therapy in 2019, after a venture with a different friend fell through. "Turns out that the easy part is finding good opportunities and doing the business side," Kim said. "The hard part is the emotional stuff."
He'd never gone to therapy, but heard positive things from his friend Wei. Through his sessions, Kim saw that he and his previous business partner had been "stonewalling" each other and were acting "super avoidant," he said.
So, when Wei and Kim decided to join forces to launch Karat later that year, therapy felt like a natural step to ensure they were setting themselves up for success.
"We are entirely equal, from both an equity and decision-making perspective," Wei told BI, as he and Kim are not only cofounders but also co-CEOs of Karat. It makes it that much more imperative that they communicate well and meet in the middle, he said.
Kim and Wei aren't the only startup founders getting coached together by licensed psychologists and marriage counselors. Annie Wright, a therapist in the Bay Area, said that a "disproportionately high amount" of her cofounder clients work in tech.
"We've been able to pull people back from the brink of failing relationships and potentially closing their businesses to have more functional, healthy, adaptive communication and relational styles," Wright said.
Therapy culture influences all factors of business
Therapy — and its related terminology — has been becoming more mainstream over the years, reducing stigma along the way.
"In the Bay Area, going to therapy is as normative as going to the gym, really," Wright said.
The same is increasingly true for businesses beyond the coasts, Ken Clark, a therapist from California who now works with entrepreneurs and couples in Bentonville, Arkansas, told BI. Part of that has to do with the changing demographics of business leaders. "I think therapy has gotten really normalized over the last 20 years," Clark said. He also observed that cities with younger populations (Bentonville included) tend to be more tolerant towards therapy culture in general.
Prestigious leadership programs now offer positive psychology training, and personality assessments to foster communication.
Going to cofounder couples therapy with your spouse
Iba Masood, 34, was inspired to go to couples therapy with her husband, Syed Ahmed, 36 — not for their marriage, but for their startup, Tara.AI.
The couple met as college freshmen and previously started a company to help graduates find jobs in the Middle East. Following their success, Masood and Ahmed wanted to build something even bigger: software that uses machine learning to manage and improve an organization's engineering projects.
After moving to San Francisco from Dubai, Ahmed had booked a few sessions with a therapist on his own. "We really had to get up to speed very, very quickly," Masood said, likening the early days of their new startup to a "marathon" and "rollercoaster." While she thought it was cool that her husband went to therapy, Masood was "vehemently opposed" to going herself.
That shifted when she attended Leaders in Tech (LIT), a four-day, invite-only retreat for tech founders in California. It was the brainchild of professor, author, and executive coach Carole Robin, who taught a famous Stanford course on interpersonal dynamics called "Touchy-Feely."
The retreat, Masood told BI, was all about being vulnerable about the challenges of being tech founders in the past few years: dealing with the pandemic, fluctuating valuations, and mass layoffs.
"I feel like it opened up a whole new plane of existence," Masood said. She itched to go with Ahmed.
"I was in homework mode," she said before their first appointment. "I was excited, and I was like, 'Ooh, I hope there's assignments.'"
The biggest issues cofounders face are similar to marriage problems
Just like in marriages, "the magic and mystery of how we humans choose relationships is very similar in our business relationships," Wright said. As in, people can pick cofounders who brush against their childhood wounds. Often, this translates to an opposites-attract kind of relationship. "You're going to have typically one person who's a little more of a risk taker and a visionary and one person who is a more operational integrator," Clark said.
In the early days of a startup, it can be an exhilarating and innovative dynamic. But later, it can end up being one of the most common issues founders face. It can bleed into how the duo navigates other conflicts, such as whether to fire an employee or how they split responsibilities and time off.
One of the biggest takeaways for Masood was realizing the difference in how she and Ahmed communicate. "Syed is very analytical, and I'm what they call a verbal processor, which I did not know," she said. While Masood works through problems by talking out loud, Ahmed only articulates what he's already processed on his own.
"About six months into cofounder coaching, we started having 'aha' moments," Masood said. "We were like, 'Whoa, okay. That's how you really feel about something.'"
For Wei, it was learning to turn arguments into "expressions of feelings" that helped him and Kim work through disagreements, such as whether they should live together as other cofounders do. "I" statements are "something you can't argue with," Wei said.
Having another person present helps them stay on task. "We have more than enough personality in POV," Kim said. "What we want is a neutral party who can help us understand each other truly, deeply, and get on the same page again."
Rooting out cofounder issues helps the company on a broader scale
By modeling good communication skills as cofounders, Wei and Kim hope to create a more flexible, fast-moving culture, without them "having to be involved in every single argument and playing, frankly, parents," Kim said.
"The best feedback is oftentimes the most sensitive, the most personal about who we are," he added. Through couples therapy, they have learned techniques to make that feedback productive, and not an indictment of one's character. That subtle shift "really helps us navigate very, very stormy waters when everyone has very different and strong POVs," he said.
Masood said that her and Ahmed's counseling turned them into the "resident therapists" at Tara AI. "Colleagues started giving us compliments, which was pretty cool," she said, recalling notes about being more present with her team. "I don't think either of us expected that as a side effect or outcome."
During the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, Masood had to communicate with and reassure the rest of the company that they'd still make payroll while simultaneously rushing to the bank for an emergency wire.
"Because I had done some inner work prior, it felt less chaotic and I had mental clarity going in on how we were going to handle the situation," she said.
Zooming out, company departments can mimic the same push-pull dynamics as cofounders. For instance, Kim said that their support and engineering teams can clash because engineering will push for new features, which creates more work for support. Therapy helps them collaborate more smoothly.
The results have led to big gains for both companies. In the five years Kim and Wei have done therapy together, Karat reached another $70 million in fresh funding, with backers like Will Smith's venture fund.
While Ahmed and Masood no longer go to cofounder therapy, Masood noted the company's growth since that period. Tara.AI has brought on MongoDB, HubSpot, and Prometric as clients and been accepted into the Google for Startups Accelerator.
She looks back on her time in therapy with fondness. "Ideally, if you're a good founder, you should have strong opinions, but they should be loosely held," she said. "I'm happy to be proven wrong. I think that's where true growth really came over time."
