When starting a new business, one has to choose between founding as a solo entrepreneur or as a team. Having a look at the start-up landscape research has shown that most of the new ventures decide to start as a team. The concept of friendship among founders reveals contradictory suggestions when it comes to its influence on the start-up success and founders often ask themselves if they should found with their friends or not.
Although there are arguments against founding with friends, there are also examples of companies that started out as a team between good friends and have managed to be globally well-known billion-dollar companies. Airbnb, for instance, was founded by three good friends. Similarly, Microsoft, as well as Google, were both founded by two college friends. Together with my two fellow students, we used a qualitative research approach to explore this topic and answer the question:
How does friendship within a team of co-founders influence Entrepreneurial Opportunity Development?
To answer our research question we started with a literature review on the Entrepreneurial Opportunity Development process, the different factors of social interaction and their influence on EOD, and the influence of friendship on team dynamics in general. Due to the novelty of our topic, we followed a qualitative research approach by conducting six semi-structured interviews with three start-ups from different industries to explore the influence of friendship on EOD.
To evaluate the influence of friendship on startups’ success, it was important to select start-ups within their early phase and who are still doing nascent activities. So we decided to focus on start-ups that have not been founded earlier than two years ago. Moreover, to discover the core of our research question it was important that the co-founders had built their friendship before founding the business. In terms of the friendship length, and level of intensity, there were no restrictions in order to remain open toward discovering different influencing factors. Furthermore, we also interviewed a team where a Management Buy-Out of former friends took place in order to check for certain downsides within the EOD process.
