Should You Start a Company with a Friend? How VCs Really Evaluate Founding Teams

The Question Every Founder Asks Before Day One

Before taking the leap, most aspiring founders cycle through the same mental checklist:

This idea has real legs — but I can't pull it off alone. Who do I build with? A college friend? A former colleague? Someone I've never met but who's technically brilliant?

Before those questions have answers, there's a more fundamental one worth asking: what does a founding team actually need to accomplish — and what does it take to get there?

Only by understanding the journey can you begin to figure out who belongs on it.

Here's how Kakao Ventures thinks about it.

The Founding Team's North Star: Achieving Market Fit

At its core, building a startup means creating something new and getting it in front of people who need it. That sounds simple. It rarely is.

To execute on that mission, every early-stage team needs to cover three functional domains: technology and product development, business strategy and management, and operations and execution. The number of people handling each domain will vary — but the principle doesn't: your team's strengths need to complement each other.

Two Rabbits, One Team

The most important dimension here is balance — specifically, the balance between technical depth and business acumen.

A technically brilliant team that can't find its market won't survive. A market-savvy team with a fragile product won't either. You need both.

Consider ASEN, a biosensor startup in the Kakao Ventures family. The founding team pairs CEO Se-jeong Park — a former management consultant and PMO director — with CTO Professor Jin-woo Park, a materials science professor leading R&D. Business and technology, in clean equilibrium.

Right-Size Your Team for the Stage You're In

Balance isn't just about coverage. It's about calibration.

A pre-seed team and a Series B team face fundamentally different problems. The roles you need at one stage may be premature — or even counterproductive — at another. Filling seats before the company needs them is a trap.

At Kakao Ventures, we've met plenty of early-stage startups where the only C-suite title in the room belongs to the CEO. That's often the right call. Start lean: a CEO and a few key hires, with the option to expand into a COO or CTO role as the company scales.

For co-founders, clarity of ownership matters as much as coverage. One founder handles fundraising and external relationships; the other owns product and internal operations. Simple, but powerful.

What VCs Are Actually Looking For
: The Drive to Build Great Teams

When we evaluate early-stage companies, we're often evaluating the founder more than the team — because at that stage, the team is still being built.

Founders who earn our conviction tend to share a few qualities: they define problems in ways no one else has, they stay relentlessly customer-focused, and — most relevant here — they are obsessive about finding and recruiting the best people.

Not just people who are available. Not just people they already know. The best people — and they won't stop until they've convinced them to join.

The strongest founders we've seen spend years quietly building their talent pipeline before they ever incorporate. They identify the best operators and engineers in their respective domains, earn their trust over time, and then recruit them when the moment comes.

That intentional, relentless approach to team-building signals something important: this founder knows that the company is only as strong as the people in it.

So — Should You Start a Company with a Friend?

Back to the original question.

The short answer: it's not about where you find your co-founder. It's about who they are.

Your full network is fair game for recruiting — friends included. But the reason co-founding with a friend comes up so often is that personal chemistry and professional compatibility aren't the same thing.

People sometimes compare co-founding to marriage. You can know someone for years and still discover, once you're living together, that your habits are incompatible. The same dynamic applies in a startup. Someone who's a great friend might have a completely different decision-making style, work ethic, or risk tolerance once you're in the trenches together.

That's why we tend to have higher confidence in teams where the founders have already seen each other operate — former colleagues, teammates on a class project, collaborators on a side project. That prior context means you're not discovering how someone works under pressure for the first time in a crisis.

The Talent Magnet Test

One of the most reliable ways to assess a founder's team-building ability is to ask whether they're a Talent Magnet — someone who naturally attracts exceptional people.

Sometimes this shows up in the room. A founder who communicates with clarity and depth, who can articulate a vision compellingly enough that you leave the meeting thinking this person is going to attract serious talent — that's a signal.

Sometimes it shows up in the track record. If a founder has built companies before, and former teammates are lining up to join them again, that's not a coincidence. It's evidence. The people who worked most closely with this founder — people who saw them at their worst as well as their best — chose to come back. That says more than any pitch deck.

Does a Great Team Have to Be a Team at All?

There's a question lurking behind all of this:

What if one person can do it all? Do you actually need a co-founder?

The solo founder is no longer a rarity. According to Carta, 35% of new startups in 2024 were founded by a single person — up from just 17% in 2015, and closing in fast on the long-dominant two-person model. AI tools have made it genuinely possible for one person to handle product development, design, marketing, and content at a level that previously required a small team.

But here's the distinction that matters: what's possible and what's preferred aren't the same thing.

Most VCs — Kakao Ventures included — still favor co-founded teams at the earliest stages. The reason isn't about capability. It's about risk.

A solo founder has real structural advantages: faster decision-making, no conflict resolution overhead, full ownership of the vision. But the startup journey is long and punishing. The moments when you want to quit are real. A co-founder doesn't just add capacity — they provide the psychological ballast to keep going when things get hard. Without that, burnout risk is a genuine investment concern.

There's also a product dimension. Ideas get better when they're challenged. A co-founder who pushes back on your assumptions — who forces you to defend your thinking and sharpen your reasoning — is a structural asset. Without one, you're operating without a pressure test.

And practically: if something happens to the sole founder, the company stops.

So the question we're actually asking isn't one person or two? It's: how does this team structure mitigate early-stage risk?

How are you stress-testing your decisions? What mechanisms exist to compensate for gaps in skill or bandwidth? How does your structure hold up when things go sideways?

What we're increasingly excited about is the Tiny Team model: two or three people, each capable of operating with the leverage of ten, compounding each other's output into something much larger than the sum of their parts.

The Real Criteria: Functional Completeness + Room to Scale

We started with a simple question. We'll end with a more useful one.

The form of a founding team — friend or stranger, solo or duo — matters far less than its function. What we're looking for is a team that:

• Has the functional coverage to execute on the problem at hand, right now

• Is built to scale — not locked into the current structure as the company grows

If you're in the process of building your founding team, these questions are worth sitting with:

The perfect founding team doesn't exist on day one. It's built through iteration, honest self-assessment, and a relentless commitment to raising the talent density of the room.

That's the journey. Kakao Ventures is here to back the founders willing to take it.

About Kakao Ventures

Founded in 2012 and backed by Kakao — Korea's leading tech platform — Kakao Ventures is one of Korea's most active Seed-stage venture capital firms, with approximately $280M USD in AUM. We partner with founders before the path is fully defined, when conviction in people matters more than proof in numbers.

Our portfolio includes Lunit (AI cancer diagnostics), Rebellions (AI semiconductors), and Dunamu (operator of Upbit, one of Asia's largest crypto exchanges).

If you're building at the edge of what's possible — we'd like to hear from you.