When a Co-Founder’s Behavior Is Hurting You

You can take a working relationship’s impact seriously without diagnosing the person on the other side of it.

A trade show aisle at the end of the day

Connie is an illustrative composite, not a real client or a real founder. She’s 51, and she’s the co-founder and CEO of a specialty food company with about forty employees. She and her co-founder, who runs sales, started it eleven years ago out of a rented commercial space and a lot of borrowed optimism.

It’s a little after five on a Thursday in March, and the convention hall is emptying out. Connie is on her knees behind their booth, packing unopened jars back into cardboard cases. There’s a bin of used sample spoons by her elbow. The carpet smells like floor cleaner and somebody’s burnt popcorn from two aisles over.

At two o’clock they met with a buyer from a regional grocery chain, the meeting they’d both been working toward for months. Halfway through Connie’s answer about production capacity, her co-founder cut in, told the buyer she tends to get the numbers wrong, and gave a different figure. His figure was the one she’d corrected in their own planning document the week before. It’s the third time this quarter he’s corrected her in front of someone from outside the company. Ten minutes ago he texted her: Great show, partner. Drinks?

She tapes a case shut and looks at the text again. Maybe I did get it wrong, she thinks. No. I checked. Then, before she can stop herself, she opens a browser on her phone and types narcissistic co-founder into the search bar. She looks at the results for a while. She doesn’t answer the text, and she doesn’t put the phone away either.

If you’ve typed something like that into a search bar, this guide was written with you in mind. It’s for founders and co-founders who are still working with someone whose behavior is hurting them. It won’t tell you whether your co-founder has a personality disorder, because no article can. What it can do is help you take what’s happening seriously, sort out what you can and can’t know from where you’re standing, and think about where each kind of question belongs.

A quick word on my vantage point. I’m a licensed therapist, and I also work with executives as a coach. What you’re reading is general education. It isn’t therapy, coaching, or legal, financial or business advice, and it can’t tell you who’s right, what you’re owed, or what to do about your company. Connie and the other founder in this guide are illustrations, not people.

What this guide is for, and what it isn’t

This guide is about a working relationship that’s still going. You and your co-founder are still running the company together, or trying to, and something about how you’re being treated keeps hurting. Maybe it’s one incident you can’t stop replaying. Maybe it’s a pattern you’ve only recently let yourself see as a pattern.

It isn’t a guide to a partnership that has already ended. If your co-founder has left, or you have, my guide to co-founder breakups looks at what that ending can bring up. This article stays with the relationship while it’s still in front of you every day.

It also isn’t a guide to diagnosing anyone, deciding who’s at fault, or handling the business side. It won’t tell you how to structure a conversation with your board, what your agreements allow, or whether you should stay. Those are real questions. They belong with people who can see your actual situation, and they deserve more than a general article can give them.

What it can offer is a way of looking at the situation that doesn’t depend on a label. The behavior matters whether or not anyone ever puts a name to it.

What the word narcissistic can and can’t tell you

The word gets used in two very different ways. In everyday speech, people sometimes call someone narcissistic when they seem self-centered, take credit, or don’t seem to care how they land on others. In clinical settings, narcissistic personality disorder is a specific diagnosis, and it means something narrower than the everyday word.

That has a few consequences worth naming. Workplace observations or a checklist alone can’t establish a clinical diagnosis. A meeting, a text thread or a year of hard quarters can’t tell you whether your co-founder has one, and I can’t tell from the outside either. If someone has told you about an actual diagnosis, that’s a different situation from inferring one from how they behave, and I’d be wary of any article, quiz or checklist that offers to do the inferring. Someone could behave hurtfully without having any disorder. Someone could have a diagnosis and not treat you this way. And a diagnosis, by itself, wouldn’t mean someone is abusive, dishonest or dangerous, or tell you what your co-founder is going to do next.

Not being able to name a diagnosis doesn’t make the behavior less real, and it doesn’t make your reaction to it less valid. If your co-founder repeatedly undermines you in front of people you need to trust you, that’s worth taking seriously on its own terms. It doesn’t need a clinical label to count.

Five things that aren’t the same

When a working relationship hurts, it’s easy to let several different questions collapse into one. It may help to keep them apart:

• A disagreement. Two people see a decision differently. Co-founders can disagree, sometimes loudly, and still have a working partnership.
• An unfair act. One specific thing happened that wasn’t fair to you. It can be worth addressing even if it never happens again.
• A harmful pattern. Similar things keep happening, and they’re affecting your work, your standing or your wellbeing. A pattern is about what repeats, not about why.
• A diagnosis. A clinical judgment a qualified provider makes after evaluating a person. Workplace observations can’t establish it on their own, and this article can’t either.
• A legal finding. A conclusion about rights, duties or a breach, reached under the law and your actual agreements. Only the people with the facts, the documents and the authority to decide can reach it.

These five aren’t a clinical or legal classification. They’re a way of keeping questions apart in this guide. They can overlap. Something can be a disagreement and an unfair act at once. A harmful pattern can exist with or without a diagnosis, and with or without any legal consequence. But answering one of these questions doesn’t answer the others. Deciding that your co-founder is a narcissist wouldn’t tell you whether you have a legal claim. Learning that you don’t have one wouldn’t mean the pattern isn’t hurting you.

It’s also worth being honest that you’re seeing one side of it. You can’t know your co-founder’s intentions from the outside, and this guide won’t guess at them. You don’t have to know someone’s intentions to know how their behavior is affecting you.

Paying attention to the conduct and its impact

Two things are within your view, whatever the label: what happened, and what it’s doing to you.

What happened is the specific conduct. Not he’s a narcissist, but he told the buyer I get the numbers wrong and gave a figure I’d already corrected. Not he never respects me, but this is the third time this quarter he’s corrected me in front of someone outside the company. A specific description can be easier to think about than a conclusion, and easier to bring to a therapist, a coach or an advisor, because it describes what you saw rather than what you’ve decided.

What it’s doing to you is the impact. That can show up at work: you’ve started rehearsing answers before meetings, or you’ve stopped bringing your co-founder into conversations you used to share. It can show up outside work, too, in how you’re sleeping, how often you’re checking your phone at night, or how much of your weekend goes to replaying something from Thursday. If changes like those worry you, a primary care provider or a licensed mental health professional can help you look at what’s behind them. An article can’t tell you.

Connie’s version of this is small and specific. On the drive home from the convention center, she doesn’t decide what her co-founder is. She notices that she’s gripping the steering wheel harder than she needs to, that she’s already planning how to answer capacity questions at the next buyer meeting so he can’t cut in, and that she hasn’t told anyone at the company how the meeting went. Those details don’t settle anything about him. They tell her something about how the situation is landing on her.

A hockey rink before sunrise

Jia is an illustrative composite, not a real client or a real founder. She’s 42, and she’s the co-founder and chief operating officer of a company that makes equipment-tracking software for construction firms. She and her co-founder, who’s the CEO, have been building it together for six years. They were friends first.

It’s 6:15 on a Saturday morning in November, and Jia is sitting on a cold aluminum bench at the community ice rink while her son’s team runs skating drills. The air smells like rubber mats and the fryer at the snack bar, which hasn’t opened yet. She has hand warmers in both coat pockets and her phone in her lap.

On the screen is a message her co-founder sent at 11:48 last night. It’s long. It lists what’s wrong with the rollout plan Jia presented on Friday, and several things that are wrong with how Jia has been running operations generally. At Friday’s leadership meeting, her co-founder called the same plan fine and moved on to the next item. This isn’t the first time a late-night message has said something very different from what was said in the room.

Jia opens the rollout plan and reads it again from the top, looking for whatever she missed. Is it me? she thinks. Am I getting worse at this? She starts a reply, gets two sentences in, and deletes it. Out on the ice, a coach blows a whistle. She puts the phone face down on the bench, then turns it back over.

Jia’s co-founder is a woman, and Connie’s is a man. Nothing in this guide depends on anyone’s gender. Hurtful behavior at work doesn’t belong to one kind of person, and neither does the experience of being on the receiving end of it.

The Systemic Lens: why co-founder behavior can be hard to name

Part of what makes this hard isn’t about either of you. It’s about the structure you’re working inside.

If you’ve worked in a larger organization, you may remember that a concern about a colleague had somewhere to go, like a manager or an HR team. Between co-founders, there may not be anyone above either of you. Depending on how your company is set up, your co-founder might also be a fellow board member, a major shareholder, the person investors think of as the face of the company, or the friend who was in your wedding. Each of those roles can make it harder to say, even to yourself, that something about how you’re being treated isn’t okay.

There can be other pressures, too. Your company might be small enough that there’s no one to talk to without it becoming a company matter. You might feel that the company depends on the two of you looking united to employees, customers or investors. You might be working somewhere that treats harsh treatment as a normal part of building something. I’m not describing your company, and none of this has to apply. But if any of it does, it can make harmful behavior easier to explain away and harder to name.

That’s one reason the search for a label can feel so urgent. When there’s no obvious place to take a concern, a word like narcissist can seem like the thing that would finally make it legitimate. The concern is already legitimate. What it may need is a place to go.

Where each question belongs

If you’re carrying a lot of questions at once, it can help to sort them by who’s actually in a position to help with them. There isn’t a correct order, and some questions belong in more than one place.

Legal, financial and governance questions. What your agreements allow, what you’re obligated to do, what your rights are, and what options exist for the company or for you belong with a qualified attorney or financial advisor of your own, who can look at your actual agreements and circumstances. That includes questions about records, conversations, disclosure, complaints and leaving. The answers depend on facts and law this article can’t see, and general advice about them can do real harm. Some of these questions may come with deadlines, and a qualified advisor is the one who can tell you whether yours do.

Leadership, business and communication questions. How you want to lead through this, how you want to handle the next buyer meeting, how you want to think about your role and your working relationship, and what kind of founder you want to be while this is happening are questions a business advisor, mentor or executive coach can help you think through.

Personal questions. How this is affecting you, what it’s bringing up, and how you’re coping belong with the people who support you, and with a licensed mental health professional if you want clinical support.

Connie’s questions don’t sort neatly. On Monday at 7:40 a.m. she’s at her desk with the production report open, and through the wall she can hear the bottling line starting up, a steady clatter of glass. The capacity figure for the grocery buyer is a CEO’s question. It has an answer, and she can find it with her production lead and send it. How it felt to hear, in front of that buyer, that she tends to get the numbers wrong is a different question. It doesn’t go away when the figure is settled, and it isn’t one her production lead can help with. She sends the figure before lunch. She hasn’t said anything to her co-founder, and she doesn’t know yet whether she will, or who she’d want to talk it through with first.

Safety is a different kind of question. A threat of legal action or a hard business disagreement isn’t the same as a threat of physical harm, and it belongs with the advisors above. But if your co-founder has threatened to hurt you, or you’re worried about your physical safety, general communication advice isn’t a safety plan, and a conversation or joint meeting isn’t the next step. Look for individualized help that fits your actual circumstances. In the U.S., if you’re in immediate danger or having a medical emergency, call 911. Urgent help shouldn’t wait for a joint meeting, a business decision or legal advice.

What individual support can and can’t offer

Individual support doesn’t put another person’s conduct under your control, and it doesn’t promise a particular outcome. It also isn’t a way to settle a business or legal dispute. What it can offer is a place to think through what’s happening, where your side of it doesn’t have to be managed, defended or kept polished for the company.

The NIMH lists severe or long-term stress from a job, and relationship problems, among the reasons people seek therapy. You don’t have to reach a particular level of stress before looking for support, but the list is a reminder that a hard working relationship is a reasonable thing to bring. The NIMH also says that choosing a treatment plan should be based on a person’s individual needs and medical situation, under the guidance of a mental health professional. So I won’t tell you what kind of therapy you need. If you’re thinking about finding a therapist, my guide to therapy for female founders looks at what to consider when you’re choosing one.

Executive coaching is a different kind of support. As I offer it, executive coaching is for leadership, decision-making and professional growth, and that can include the business side of a hard co-founder relationship: how you want to lead, how you make decisions under pressure, and how you think about your role. It doesn’t replace clinical assessment or care. If you’re struggling with how you’re feeling or functioning, or you’re in crisis, start with clinical care.

Neither therapy nor coaching replaces qualified legal, financial or governance advice about your actual agreements. And before you start with any professional, it’s reasonable to ask how they handle privacy and records. I wouldn’t assume that any conversation, with a therapist, a coach or a friend, comes with a particular legal protection. If you have questions about what you’re allowed to share or obligated to keep, those are for your own attorney.

Both/And: you can own your part and still take the pattern seriously

In Connie’s or Jia’s position, it’s easy to get stuck on a single question: Is it me? It can feel as if the whole situation depends on the answer. If you’ve made mistakes, the thinking goes, you have no right to be hurt. If you’re hurt, it must all be the other person’s fault.

It may help to hold two true things side by side, without deciding yet how they fit together:

• You can accept an accurate correction and still not accept being belittled or repeatedly undermined.
• You can take a critique of your work seriously and still notice when what’s said in private is very different from what’s said in the room.
• You can care about your co-founder and still not accept how you’re being treated.
• You can doubt that a clinical label fits and still be hurt by the behavior.
• You can want the company to succeed and still want this part of it to change.

None of this means every correction is mistreatment. A disagreement or a factual correction isn’t automatically mistreatment, even when it stings. If a figure is wrong, someone may need to say so before a buyer relies on it. Wording, facts and context matter. A late-night critique, or feedback that’s different in private than in a meeting, isn’t by itself abuse or a sign of a disorder either. What these pairs point to is the difference between receiving an accurate correction and being personally belittled or repeatedly undermined.

Acknowledging your own part is worth doing. It’s also not the same as settling every concern about how you’re treated. Both can be true at once, and neither one cancels the other.

Where they are now

Connie is home. The unsold cases are stacked in her garage, and the text from her co-founder is still unanswered. She’s started a message to a friend from her first job, the one person outside the company she might tell about the buyer meeting. She hasn’t sent it yet.

Jia’s son is out of his skates and asking about breakfast. The late-night message is still on her phone. She’s put a question on her own calendar for Monday afternoon, just for herself: What do I actually want to happen here? She doesn’t know the answer yet.

Neither of them knows what their co-founder is thinking, and neither of them knows how this goes. Some of what’s in front of them may have a deadline. A lot of it doesn’t.

If some of this is yours, you don’t have to decide what your co-founder is before you’re allowed to take it seriously. It can be enough to name what happened and how it’s landing on you, and to notice which questions belong to the business and which belong to you. You don’t have to carry the second kind by yourself. A friend you trust, a primary care provider, or a therapist or coach of your own can be a first step.

Warmly,
Annie.