Find the right co-founders for your start-up

Building a successful startup or scaleup is not easy and requires market knowledge, financing, a viable business model and marketing. However, besides the right team it’s crucial to have the right cofounder or cofounders.

But how do you know you have the right cofounder? Accelerators and VC’s will tell you, you need to have complementary skills and experience as founders. The combination of a commercial genius and a technical guru will have a higher success rate than two marketing guys or girls starting a new venture.

Having two founders on the team, rather than one, significantly increases a startup’s odds of success. According to Startup Genome, startups will raise startup capital 30% more investment, grow their customers three times as fast, and will be less likely to scale too quickly. It’s clear that two fully invested founders are greater than the sum of their parts.

Finding a co-founder can be challenging. After all, you’ll need to work together, align with each other, work under pressure,… So working with the wrong partner will hurt the success of your startup or scaleup.

During this workshop we’ll explore some possibilities to experience the dynamics between cofounders and the impact on the success of the business based on Sytemic Work. You’ll discover the gaps, improvements points and find way to work together in and be greater than the sum of the parts. All elements are part of a system and must be in balance to work in an optimal way.

This workshop is based on the master thesis “How systemic constellation can contribute to the recruitment process”, in which the systemic principles are used to select the “most suitable person for the organization”.

Systemic Shifts, founded by Wouter Gheysen aims to promote systemic work in companies and organizations. Wouter’s interest in systemic started attending a family constellation in 2010. During his first constellation, he saw the possibilities of systemic work in companies. In 2012 he published a master thesis “How systemic constellation can contribute to the recruitment process”. It was the recording of the results of his research on using systemic constellations in recruiting new employees. During several workshops he explored ways of getting insights on the impact of a new employee on the organization system. Over the years, Wouter experimented with different applications of constellations in companies, such as drawing up a business model, branding and market position topics. In 2020, Wouter completed his training as an organization facilitator. That year, Wouter also founded Systemic Shifts with the aim of guiding organizations in dealing with complex issues.