- The speaker observed workers in Kyoto and found their work to be poetic
- The speaker discusses the challenges of maintaining a long-term relationship in a startup
- Research on marriages by John Gottman is mentioned, including his ability to predict divorce based on arguments
- The speaker discusses the common issues that lead to conflict in relationships and how they relate to co-founders in a startup
- Strategies for avoiding destructive behaviors in conflict are outlined, including dividing responsibilities and understanding attachment styles

- The video discusses the importance of understanding and meeting the emotional needs of oneself and a partner in a relationship.
- It recommends creating a process for dealing with disagreements and documenting them to protect from criticism.
- The video also emphasizes the use of nonviolent communication to express criticism in a non-threatening way.
- It highlights the importance of starting criticism with concrete observations and expressing emotions and needs in a universal and non-specific way.

- Be cautious of making needs specific to yourself
- Make requests, not demands
- Practice level 3 conversations for deep, relational discussions
- Discuss and align on short-term goals, roles, and performance
- Use nonviolent communication for honest feedback
- Regularly pay down emotional debt to prevent issues from escalating

The video discusses the poetic nature of work in Kyoto and the challenges of maintaining a long-term relationship in a startup. It mentions research on marriages by John Gottman and outlines strategies for avoiding destructive behaviors in conflict. The importance of understanding emotional needs, creating a process for disagreements, and using nonviolent communication is emphasized. It also recommends being cautious of making needs specific to oneself, making requests instead of demands, and practicing level 3 conversations for deep discussions. Regularly paying down emotional debt is advised to prevent issues from escalating."""

YC Partner Kevin Hale talks about the importance of building a successful working relationship with your cofounders, and setting up processes to optimize for the strengths of your team.

Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6n-how-to-work-together

This lecture is part of YC's Startup School, a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 Introduction
00:30 Marriage advice
2:33 Four things to avoid when fighting
4:22 Planning for disagreements
13:05 Non-violent communication
22:48 Pay down emotional debt
26:30 Conclusion

Looking for a co-founder? Try YC's new co-founder matching platform: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching

These are some guys I saw in Kyoto and they're tearing down a scaffolding and I just think they're amazingly poetic in how they do their work.

So in a startup, Founders basically have to figure out how to optimize for a relationship that lasts for like 10 years.

And that's a crazy thing to do with someone you might only know for a couple of months or have only known in a sort of work setting.

And the thing is, like, the only models for understanding that kind of relationship actually come probably from our parents.

And so I'd like to start off with some marriage research.

He's been featured in This American Life and a bunch of different places.

And basically, he has a cool magic trick.

He can watch a couple fight about something for 15 minutes and predict with 85% accuracy whether they'll be divorced or not 4 years from now.

If he watches them for an hour and have them also share their hopes and dreams, his prediction rating goes up to 94%.

And so this is the same videos they would show to priests, psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage counselors, successfully married couples, and they don't predict better than random chance.

And so, John Connell, he's figured something out.

There's something about the way we will have an argument that determines longevity.

And 1 of the most surprising things that he discovered was that it's not that successfully married people who will last a long time that they never fight.

And we all fight about the exact same things.

Money, kids, sex, time, jealousy, and the in-laws.

And time is usually what are we gonna do with our free time?

And the thing that's interesting is like, I think all of these map out to the stuff that we're gonna fight about in a company.

And so you, with your co-founders, are gonna have these issues.

And the thing is, What's nice about knowing everyone fights and that you know what you're going to fight about is that we can make a plan for figuring out how to deal with this 1 situation that will determine whether we will work together on the thing that we're so passionate about down the road.

The other thing that John Gottman figured out is that there's 4 major things we wanna avoid when we're fighting.

And when we do these things, they will create sort of leading indicators that the relationship is in serious trouble.

This is basically like, you're talking with someone and you're just like, hey, you know what, I have a serious concern about this bug that we are trying to fix, and I'm really worried about this thing, and I'm not sure that we're gonna be able to deploy on time, and someone comes up and says, well, you know what I don't like?

Is the fact that you leave a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink.

And criticism is basically this idea that we don't fight on 1 topic.

We start trying to bring all these other issues into play, instead of addressing the 1 issue at hand.

So basically, I say, hey, I'm worried about this bug, and we're not going to be able to deploy on time.

And someone says, I don't like your face.

And what you want to avoid is making things personal.

It is that someone not owning responsibility about the problem.

And so we can't move forward because someone won't admit that there's a problem out there.

We defend that we haven't done anything wrong.

And therefore there can't be resolution between 2 people if the other person thinks there's a problem.

And it's when basically you're like, hey, I got a problem and the person just walks away.

And so there can be no way to create any kind of resolution.

So just as you wouldn't do this without doing some of this, we want to make a plan.

And I'm going to talk about 4 different things that we can do that helps avoid and protect us from those 4 horsemen.

This feels pretty straightforward, but you want to do this early in the relationship with your co-founders and in the early stages of your company.

So here's our list again of the types of things that we might have problems with.

And in the early stages of the startup, let's say Adora and I are doing a startup together, just her and me, then what you want to do is just kind of say like, oh, who's responsible?

And what this will do is, like, if there's a problem in that category, then that person that we have assigned ahead of time to be in charge will be the ones that will ultimately either make the decision or ultimately are responsible.

So notice here on jealousy, this is about competition usually.

And so usually in the early stages of your startup, you should not be worried about competition.

Competition is not usually what kills you in the very early stages of your company.

As your company ages, it might change and look something like this.

You'll assign things to different sort of positions and heads.

And as a result, then when their problems come up, you know basically that sort of is delegated.

Now what happens if things go out of hand, even up at those sort of levels?

Well, basically, what you want to do is decide after you delegate who has ownership, determine what is success and failure.

You want to know also ahead of time, hey, we've divided up the task, but we also want to know is like, hey, when is there going to be interference with the person that is supposed to be leading these decisions?

What is considered, like, it's success enough that we shouldn't be interfering?

Just let them do what they think is best.

And what is considered really bad so that we have to interfere and something has to be done about it.

So in this case, good examples would be like, hey, you know, if we've successfully fundraised, like we don't need to talk or like replace the person that's responsible for that.

If we're shipping on time, if we're rated top 3 amongst our sort of peers, or we've built a referral program that's working, hey, we don't need to be criticizing the person that's working on the stuff, or they're doing a good job.

On the corollary, we want to define, hey, what are the things that basically are going to trigger conversations, really hard conversations like, hey, if we hit this sort of area, we need to put the brakes on and we need to discuss what's going on and actually try to resolve these problems.

A lot of people like to delegate stuff, but they don't have a way of saying, hey, when are we going to have a conversation about this when there's trouble?

And the reason you want to do these early while you're sober, emotionally sober, is because once you get angry and emotions come into play, then you might not be thinking rationally.

Now ultimately in the end, usually it's the CEO in the company who has final say.

Now you as a team can decide differently how you wanna resolve it if you divvy up the stuff, but ultimately whoever is the CEO usually is the 1 who resolves it.

And if there's problems with the CEO, then it's the board.

In the early stages of the startup, the board is usually composed of just the founders, so you have to ultimately work it out.

The second defense against the 4 horsemen is knowing yourself.

And what I mean is, what is your attachment style?

So there was all this research that was done in the 1960s about how people approach relationships.

And basically, it was determined that there's sort of 3 major types.

And that means basically it's like, hey, you know what?

I don't have a problem going up to people, relying on them, and having them rely on me, and sort of like us creating a relationship.

I don't mind being vulnerable, and I don't mind other people being vulnerable with me.

So there's a type of person that will be like, you know what, I kinda don't get enough love, as not as much as I want.

I kinda wanna like hold onto people, and I kinda wanna have people constantly confirm with me that they want to be with me.

And then there's another point, kind of person, just like, I find it kind of difficult creating relationships with people and I kind of want to run away sometimes because it's really scary or I'm worried that I'm going to mess it up.

The thing that's super important here, especially with your co-founder, is you want to know your co-founder's attachment style because that's going to dictate how you are going to be able to resolve and understand your differences.

Now what it turns out, oddly enough, is that an anxious attachment person and an avoidant attachment person, these are the 2 most common in the world, there's not that many like well developed secure people out there.

So the person that wants to run away and the person that wants to cling.

And so what you have is someone who needs space to make a decision and to process problems and tension, and as someone who needs validation constantly, the process, conflict and issues.

And so when those 2 people are together and they don't realize what the other person needs, they don't realize that they're going to have to bend to sort of make it work.

There's lots of good books on attachment styles.

There's a wonderful Wikipedia page that covers it.

I would recommend watching this YouTube video.

And what I would highly recommend is basically understanding that if you're with someone that is of the opposite type, that you're going to have to do work either to reach across the aisle.

Like if you're an anxious person and you're talking to an avoidant person, you just have to realize, like, oh, that person needs space, but that doesn't mean they're running away from you.

And if you're an avoidant person with an anxious person, that if someone needs your attention, or if you need your space, then you have to let them know, it's like, hey, I'm gonna be back.

I realize that you're gonna need an answer for this.

I'm gonna go away, I'm gonna figure stuff out, and I promise a time that we will deal with this.

And so basically, when you're emotionally sober, it's the best time to create a process for dealing with disagreements.

And the reason you want to do this is because once you're upset and angry and filled with emotions, you are not going to be thinking straight.

And so the odds are you might say something you regret, you might say something that you don't mean, and the other person might do so, and then you will have a much different problem than the bug not being fixed and deployed on time.

So, 1 of my favorite examples of this comes from the company called Matter, and they created a spreadsheet for dealing with disagreements.

Basically, it's a disagreement decision framework.

And basically, it just talks about, it's like, hey, when we have a disagreement, we should just document it.

This helps make things really, really transparent, makes us understand both sides very, very clearly.

We say who made the decision, what the decision was, the date it was done, and the rationale.

And so when we walk through this process, if we've decided this ahead of time, then it means that we are not afraid when disagreements come up.

It's like, oh, we have a process for dealing with this, and we will figure it out by filling out Excel.

There's lots of different ways to do this.

You don't have to follow their sort of very specific framework.

They have lots of really great justifications in their article.

You just have to agree ahead of time what you want to do.

So therefore when you are upset, you just go, okay, great, we have a process for this.

And the process says, oh, it says go have a time out.

And then we'll figure out what we have to do.

It could be a process where it's like, hey, if there's a real disagreement and both sides feel equally strong, we will flip a coin, and then that will be the decision for the test of time.

This strategy will protect you from contempt.

So the way that you avoid making things personal is you have to figure out a way of communicating with another in a way that will not be threatening.

It's called Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, and it helps you be honest with other people without criticizing, without insulting, without putting down other people.

And the magic comes in the structure that feels somewhat fake for people who are not into being touchy-feely.

Basically, when you're giving some kind of criticism, you want to basically have it in this format.

So when some observation, I feel an emotion because I'm needing some universal need, would you be able to request?

So we're just going to break down each 1 of these different parts.

And they're all, every single 1 of these are tricky.

And it's a thing that a lot of people will try to do, and you'll spend your whole life trying to get really good at.

So the first 1 is you need to make an observation versus having an evaluation.

So basically what you wanna do is start your disagreement or criticism by anchoring it to something that is concrete.

You do not want it to be something that is connected to opinion.

It should be something that you actually saw or heard.

Because therefore, you can't disagree with something that actually happened versus something I heard via rumor or something that has to do something that seems emotional or something that seems like an opinion.

An observation would be like, you said that you'd sent that document last week and I haven't received it.

An evaluation that someone might say instead in the heat of the moment is that you're fucking lazy.

That kind of feels like an observation, but it's not.

Instead, hey, 3 of the numbers in this report were inaccurate.

You want to be really careful because that's a generalization.

Observation, hey, you arrived 10 minutes late to the meeting this morning.

Observation, I sent you 2 emails and I haven't received the response.

Notice, when we start with observation, we start with a fact that can't be refuted.

And so we're not going to end up arguing about something else.

Notice all those other evaluations, they immediately will trigger an emotion in you.

And so that's why you want to be really careful that when you start this criticism that you don't start with 1 of those.

The next is we have to talk about our emotions, right?

So I saw this irrefutable observation and it made me feel something.

And what we have to be really careful of is not saying thoughts, but instead talking about feelings, which is kind of odd.

But it's connected to the next point in the structure.

So an emotion will be, I feel frustrated.

Now, a thought would be, and it could be put in the same structure, is like, I feel that you aren't taking this seriously.

And the way you can tell if something is a thought or a feeling, is you substitute the phrase, I think, with I feel, and it still works.

I think that you aren't taking this seriously.

There's a couple of emotions that we have to be particularly careful of.

1 is anger, because anger is usually tied to a bunch of hosts of other things.

So when someone says that, I feel angry, you or you realizing that you feel angry, you want to be really, really specific about what's causing the anger, what's triggering it.

The other tricky emotions are evaluative emotions.

And Usually what you need to figure out is what underlines that evaluation.

Someone is blaming me, and so I feel scared.

So it takes a lot of work to understand that when someone is giving me some, if I'm feeling like some kind of judging feeling, what is at the core root of it?

The impactful statement is actually, I feel frustrated.

I'm going to have a link inside of this presentation to a PDF.

It's 3 pages of evaluative emotions, impacted feelings you probably actually are feeling, and then connects this to a universal need that you need to overcome it, which leads us to our next thing.

Every negative emotion lies in unmet universal need.

And so what that means is that like when you're feeling 1 of these frustrated or blamed or scared or hurt feelings, there's something that's missing that you're going to need.

And the thing that's really tricky about universal needs is you have to be careful of realizing, is it a strategy or is it a need?

You might be able to say, I need a sandwich.

And then you might say, like, I need a sandwich to give me nourishment.

A much better way might be...let me see here.

You might say something like, I need you to copy me on every single email.

But the thing is, that's not a universal need.

A universal need would be, I need some transparency about this process.

You have to be careful of not making needs about something that's very specific to yourself or just that situation.

Because once it's a universal need, then it's something that everyone can agree that everyone should sort of have.

So other universal needs are like, I need support.

And the way you turn it not into universal need is by saying something like, I need support from you.

It's not everyone needs support from Henry, right?

And it says you include from you, it stops being universal.

So you want to be really careful of this.

So at the very end, so basically we said like, hey, I noticed something that can't be refuted.

I told you about a feeling and how it impacts me.

And I told you that basically it results in some universal need that we all can agree that we need to have.

And now we get to saying what we'd like to have changed as a result.

And what you want to make is a request, not a demand.

The difference is that a request is an invitation to the other person to meet our universal needs.

It's much easier to be able to do than to say, like, I order you to do something.

So what we want to do is make it very specific, our request.

So I request for you to be more respectful is not that great because who defines what's respectful?

My version of respectful might be different from someone else's.

Your request should be something like, I request that you arrive to meetings on time.

So what a lot of people will say is, I request that you don't dismiss other people's ideas straight away.

The thing is, it doesn't indicate the behavior that you do want, and so it becomes really difficult to act on.

A better 1 would be, I request that when a team member shares an idea, you ask 2 or 3 probing questions before sharing a conclusion.

And so sometimes you might make a request and someone might say no.

And what you need to do is not just freak out that the whole process isn't working.

The idea is actually to be like, maybe I haven't put this request in a way that can meet more needs than just myself.

Could I do this in a way so that they can understand and be on board for everyone to be sort of involved?

If you want to learn more, there's a really great article on delivering constructive feedback in different situations by Dave Bailey.

And he goes into far more detail and is a very, very good starting point for giving out this really hard feedback.

We all know what technical debt is, right?

So when we're building out software really, really quickly, and sometimes you're like, well, that's not going to scale really well, and it's going to be dirty and quick, but I'm going to get it out the door and I'm just going to put that in the back of my mind.

Well, in our relationships with 1 another, you will incur emotional debt.

And unlike technical debt, you really don't want that to go for very long.

So it turns out, also in John Gottman's research, that it wasn't that people who were really good at being in a marriage only fought about really big things.

It Turns out they would immediately bring up stuff even when it's really tiny or small.

They would never let a small thing grow to be a medium thing and then eventually a big thing.

They immediately would talk about it like, oh man, can you close your mouth while you're chewing real quick?

It's just like kind of bothering me right now.

And then do it in a way that's sort of respectful.

And so like when you're with your co-founders and you're in this really sensitive relationship and you're finding stuff that's being really troubling, like you can communicate those needs really quickly and you will prevent those small things from becoming big things.

The best way to start doing this is to practice.

So at YC we call these level 3 conversations.

So level 1 is that informal conversation.

We have other people where it's just like data exchange, passing information back and forth.

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Kevin Hale - How to Work Together