Accidental Adversaries: The Enigma of Sustained Cooperation

Abstract

Start-ups are particularly prone to existential crises. Between 40 and 90% of them fail within the first 3 years. One of the reasons is the breakdown of cooperation among founders. The peculiarity of start-ups, particularly high-tech start-ups, is that they are rarely founded by one person alone. These companies require so much knowledge that it is very difficult for just one person to know it all. Such start-ups begin with a close bond among their founders. Yet these bonds somehow break, cooperation turns into competition, and former partners become adversaries – by accident as no one sought it. Accidental Adversaries is a tame systems archetype. Yet coping with it requires understanding its dynamics and superrational behavior of the people involved.