I recently joined a team of two co-founders as the third co-founder (I am COO, there is a CEO, and a CPO). The CEO recruited the CPO (they had worked together previously), then I met both of them and joined after.I really like the CPO. He's a very talented product designer and easy to work with. We get along well and he's designed a really nice app. Before I joined the CEO/CPO hired a firm to build the MVP, which is ongoing.I'm less excited about the CEO - in the beginning, we really aligned on our vision for the app/company which I'm still excited about. But now that I've worked with him for ~6 weeks I feel like I don't see how he can lead us to success. He's been the main link with the software dev firm, and it's been a mess. They pressured him at the last minute into giving away equity and he caved, and is now trying to walk that back. He's been late on payments - it's like the contract doesn't exist and what counts is what he and the MD of this company can agree on - but trying to pressure them to move faster when the devs have been open about how much work there is for what our requirements are. He also offered on the side to pay the devs cash bonuses for finishing faster which I found unprofessional.Other than that I am struggling to see what his killer skills are. He doesn't like to pitch (not a good public speaker), isn't a great negotiator, isn't really a people manager, doesn't write well (our shareholders agreement he drafted was a mess at first)...so I don't know what's left. It's like he came up with the idea, everyone else is executing on it, and he's doing a bunch of other random stuff and some of it is fine, but some of it is gone sideways. His background is as an analyst at an investment firm, and I feel like without having experience working at a successful startup like the CPO and I have, he's just green/doesn't have the chops.We're drafting our cofounders agreement and I'm coming to the point where I might be putting my own funds in to capitalize the company, but I'm having second thoughts. I feel like we can succeed, but only because the CPO and I are strong and the CEO listens to us/lets us do our thing. But the titles/equity are tilted in the CEO's favor since the company was his idea. I don't want to quibble about titles, but I do find myself wishing the CEO had a smaller role since he's less experienced/skilled. I just have a shaking feeling that we can get some traction + raise seed funding off that, but once there's a board/investors heaping pressure on him it's going to be a shitshow.What would you do in my situation? see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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