- Cherrytree
- Posts
- Complexity Made Simple
Complexity Made Simple
The 2 U's and 2 I's of turning cofounder complexity into your competitive advantage
Tim He
November 04, 2024 • Est. Reading Time: 5 minutes
INTRO
Hey, I’m Tim! ☕
Tomorrow is Election Day. For months now, it’s felt impossible to find content without a hidden agenda. That’s why we’ve teamed up with 1440:
Daily News for Curious Minds
Be the smartest person in the room by reading 1440! Dive into 1440, where 4 million Americans find their daily, fact-based news fix. We navigate through 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive roundup from every corner of the internet – politics, global events, business, and culture, all in a quick, 5-minute newsletter. It's completely free and devoid of bias or political influence, ensuring you get the facts straight. Subscribe to 1440 today.
It’s not just politics that’s complex.
As your entrepreneurial journey progresses, your company becomes more complex, your cofoundership becomes more complex, and you become more complex.
It’s by becoming increasingly complex that you continue to grow.
Complexity is the result of two fundamental drivers: uniqueness and union. To fully understand complexity, you must simplify it.
Once you do, it changes from a challenge into an asset.
DEEP DIVE
“The more complex the world becomes, the more simple we must make our lives." — Susan Cain, attorney, negotiations consultant, author, and 3x TED talker.
Unique Union
Uniqueness is setting yourself apart from the crowd and embracing what makes you different. Union is integrating cohesively with others and sharing a common purpose.
Productive complexity succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies. (You might notice parallels to the conformity matrix).
Complexity has a negative connotation. You synonymize it with confusing, convoluted, complicated.
But that’s only true if complexity is merely equated to uniqueness.
That’s perhaps because uniqueness is easier to build. It’s the byproduct of doing good work. You possess rarer skills and experiences, and more insightful opinions as a result.
It’s also absolutely necessary. Union without uniqueness is conformity. And as a cofounder, you definitely don’t want that.
In fact, you can achieve remarkable individual success if you’re unique enough. Isaac Newton certainly was unique. He invented calculus and formulated the laws of motion and gravitation.
Without union, however, a car engine becomes nothing more than a heap of junk.
Newton died alone, without friends or lovers, broke, anxious and depressed, discredited by certain communities, misunderstood, and underappreciated.
Thus, as Newton learned, you must apply forces —uniqueness and union— that are equal in magnitude but opposite in direction.
So how do you tackle the challenges of union within your cofoundership, especially as you each become more unique?
Uniting Uniqueness
Union can be further broken down into independence and interdependence. A lot of alliteration today.
Independence is straightforward. It’s your ability to be self-sufficient. It speaks to your competence level.
But independence alone isn’t enough, the same way only being unique isn’t either. Union based on dependency isn’t really union, is it?
Interdependence is tricky. It requires people who are fully capable of being independent, yet they choose to rely on one another. The choice to rely on each other is a conscious one, rather than one made out of necessity.
Pay attention to it the next time you’re with close friends. People start covering for each other — offering rides, picking up the check, lending a hand. These are things you could technically do yourself, but you choose to make each other’s lives a bit easier.
Accepting small favors when you don’t need them makes it easier to accept big ones when you do.
I see many first-time cofounders mistakenly operate only within their own silos and specializations under the assumption that this approach is more efficient. It’s an illusion.
Example: you’re raising a round. The business cofounder could be responsible for all of it. The technical cofounder could stay out of it and focus on engineering.
That would be a scenario in which you only considered what makes you unique and independent.
You leverage interdependence effectively by addressing the same overarching challenge but from different angles.
The business founder still takes charge of pitching the investors and selling the vision. The technical cofounder, who’s likely more analytical, can prepare the data room, financial and performance metrics, and take over more technical Q&A.
On the other hand, the business cofounder can support product development by talking to users, building non-technical demos, and creating documentation, which people tend to neglect until it’s frustratingly late.
You take what’s unique about you (strengths and interests) and hone it until you become really good at what you do. That makes you independent.
Then, you choose to be interdependent. Your uniqueness unites when you join forces rather than divide and conquer.
As a result, your ability to handle a complex task (fundraising) through a complex relationship (cofoundership) becomes your competitive advantage.
Complexity is surprisingly simply, isn’t it?