“Don’t go at it alone.”
It’s the one piece of advice serial entrepreneur and Campaign Monitor CEO Alex Bard has for aspiring startup founders.
Speaking at a startup event in the company’s Sydney office this week, the witty and insightful exec drew on his experiences of launching help desk software company Assistly in 2009, a startup which was sold to Marc Benioff’s Salesforce in 2011 for $50 million, where it was renamed Desk.com.
“Entrepreneurship is hard and doing it alone is even harder. Find a co-founder,” he told the Sydney tech community.
He explained how the co-founder relationship was an intimate one and like marriage will have its good times and ordinary times.
“Starting a startup with someone else is like getting married,” he said.
“Trust is paramount and there are going to be good times, bad times, a lot of ups and downs. The relationship between co-founders, in many ways, determines the potential and success of a company
“Co-founders will make mistakes, but hopefully only new mistakes. It’s important that every mistake made together informs how you behave differently moving forward.”
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