Papers
Read the series in order
Each paper solves a different failure of founder reasoning: naive cooperation analysis, naive departure narratives, and naive cofounder selection.
Repeated Games and the Cofounder Problem: Why Startup Cooperation Depends on Shared Time Horizons
Cooperation survives only when founders share a long enough time horizon.
cooperation constraint
delta >= (T - R) / (T - P)
A startup is not a one-shot negotiation. It is a repeated game played through hiring, product crises, financing pressure, and daily trust updates. This paper applies repeated-game theory to cofounder relationships and shows why long-term cooperation depends less on abstract loyalty than on shared time horizons, sufficiently high discount factors, and freedom from external games that dominate short-term decisions.
Founder Exit Threshold Model: Why Cofounders Rarely Leave Gradually
Departure is a regime shift caused by accumulated pressure, not a mood change.
exit hazard
X_t >= tau_i for H rounds
Founder departures are often narrated as emotional drift, but they behave more like threshold events. This paper models cofounder exit as a nonlinear transition: multiple stress variables accumulate over time, and once a founder's exit pressure crosses a personal threshold for long enough, the organization moves from unstable cooperation into departure dynamics.
Cofounder Matching Fit Function Model: How to Evaluate Who Should Build Together
The right founding pair is chosen by structural fit, not charisma or convenience.
pair selection
F_ij = rewards - penalties
Most founders select partners through intuition, chemistry, or convenience. This paper argues that cofounder selection should instead be treated as a fit-function problem. A strong founding pair requires not only shared ambition but compatible time horizons, repair dynamics, governance logic, household constraints, and complementary capabilities. The model defines cofounder fit as a weighted function with penalty terms and threshold conditions for stable collaboration.