I came to my masters degree studies hoping to find any kind of light at the end of the tunnel, hoping that all these brilliant minds have not underestimated a critical issue in the context of ideating, designing and growing a company from scratch: the psyche of the entrepreneurs themselves, their wellbeing and the way they are affected as people in this full entrepreneurial road.
One of the things I had observed during my very short (but deep) entrepreneurial experience, is that a pack of metaphors tend to be used to illustrate the road, the relationships that you need to build around it and the creations that support the entrepreneurial dream. These metaphors from my standpoint are usually used careless, not always seen with a closer look, and they could be not always unhelpful but damaging for the people behind the entrepreneurial dream.
One of those, which I was expecting not to hear from my professors, is:“a partnership is like a marriage.” But sadly, I did hear it several times and not only by one of them.
I genuinely do not understand why they insist, why we insist in using it; most of all the ones that surely have witnessed several times the disasters that this metaphor provokes in real people out there. In “people”, not partners or founders. Because somehow, the myth has been build upon founders as being these superhuman creatures that suffer no pain, show no weakness, and have no fear at all.
As this contemporary world is hungry for transparency, we need to start talking about the people behind the role and seeing them as such.
Ventures, businesses, companies, startups, call them as you fancy, are just another kind of human creation, which like any other of our creations, are susceptible to be destroyed at any moment in time or by any means. Think about a work of art during an unexpected fire, or simply getting damaged during moving. Happens all the time, even with those very important pieces.
Companies are created, exists, expand, or they don’t, people go through them, stay, or leave, or not; human creations after all.
Engaging in that creation activity is a wonderful experience, an exiting one, full of exponential learning, but it does not need to be more dramatic than what it is. And that, I think, begins by naming things as they are.
You will definitely need to build a relationship with your co-founders, your partners. But does it need to be a “marriage-like relationship”? Does this definition add value to the experience? I believe it doesn’t.
Is it indispensable to build an analogy to understand the type of relationship we are jumping in? And if it is, why insisting on building “that” analogy? Why do we need to imprint this wrong meaning to a creation that is so far away from the sphere of family and couples’ relationships?
A business partnership is not “like” any other type of relationship, nevertheless a marriage. It is not even a “rock band-like” relationship (but this metaphor is not as toxic). It is just another type of relationship, for which we have no specific name, or which we resist calling its name: partnership.
Some even use the repeated “funny” phrase: “partnerships are like marriage but without sex”. Really? It is as absurd as if someone told you when you are about to get married, that the relationship you will build with that person is “like the relationship you had with your dad or mom only with sex involved”!
Please let’s all stop buying this b.s., ¡it is nonsense! It is an ingredient that makes the road harder, not smoother, because it plays with our feelings, hopes, and projections. It gives the wrong place in our minds and hearts to what a relationship within the arena of a venture, business, or company should have.
When a company’s partners decide to part ways, it is not divorce. It is just the end of a partnership. Not the same, never the same, ever the same.
Language creates realities; any person instructed on how the human mind works will agree. Why are we feeding a language creation that imprints a wrong reality onto partnership relations? Why are we perpetuating a definition that does not add value to partners’ relationship-building, but on the opposite feels like a burden and distorts the way we look at the thing we need to be calling a marriage relationship?
Let’s call things by their names, mean them, and build value for businesses that do not destroy value for people building businesses. Let’s put the human before the partner and act accordingly. Let’s define this partnership relationship kind-of-thing, and finally, give it an identity of its own.
Alejandra Ruíz Gómez
Bogotá, Colombia
Febrero 26 de 2020