Our Story

Why we started the Institute for Founder Dynamics

A nonprofit building the research, the standards, and the professional network for the people who work with founding teams.

Meet the Founders

Two people arrived at the same problem from opposite directions.

Annie Garofalo

Co-Founder

In 2016, in a workshop in Guatemala, Annie Garofalo was building an ethical fashion brand with her closest childhood friend. The company was profitable. The partnership was struggling.

She went looking for a guide to the conversations they should have been having, and found nothing. So she went to Stanford, earned a joint MBA and MA in Sociology, and wrote the playbook herself.

Annie now guides cofounders through these critical, often avoided conversations, and teaches team development at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Matthew Jones

Co-Founder

Dr. Matthew Jones came to the same problem from the other side. A couples therapist, he sat down one afternoon to help a friend untangle things with his cofounder, and recognized the patterns he had spent his career treating in marriages.

He has worked with cofounders ever since, and wrote The Cofounder Effect, the first psychological text on cofounder partnerships.

Comparing Notes

What we found when we compared notes

After working in parallel for five years, our paths finally crossed. Our conversations kept circling the same realization: the cofounder relationship is one of the most consequential partnerships in business, and one of the least understood.

By some estimates it is the single largest preventable cause of startup failure. And yet almost no research focuses on the relationship itself. That gap is exactly why the support available to founders going through it has stayed so thin.

Cofounder coaching today is basically where couples therapy sat in the 1950s: serious practitioners doing impactful work, alone, without shared research, language, or standards.

Dr. Matthew Jones, Co-Founder

Couples therapy took fifty years to become a field. We would like this one to take considerably less.

What We're Building

The Institute's first few projects

Published

The Cofounder Coach Directory

The first directory of coaches, therapists, and mediators who have made cofounder dynamics the focus of their work — published so that founders, investors, and programs finally have somewhere to point.

50+ practitioners across 10+ countries.

View the directory

In Validation

The Cofounder Diagnostic Index

A measure of founding team health, currently in the process of becoming a psychometrically validated instrument, piloting with early-stage programs and universities. More info on this soon!

In Formation

Research Partnerships

Working with accelerators, venture capital firms, and scholars in entrepreneurship and organizational dynamics who care about early-stage teams and find value in learning more about the business and psychological impact of founding team dynamics.

A field is never the work of just two people. It is the work of a network.

The coaches, founders, researchers, and investors who care about founding teams already know the significance of this relationship. They also know the vacuum of research and training on how to support cofounding teams.

We're building the central node to channel these efforts into results.

If this mission speaks to you, we would like to know who you are.