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Entrepreneurship & Startups vocabulary · Founders & Team

Co-founder

Meaning in entrepreneurship & startups, with examples

/ˌkoʊˈfaʊndər/nounCore term

In entrepreneurship & startups, co-founder means: One of two or more people who start a company together and share the ownership, the work and the main decisions from the beginning.

In Turkish: kurucu ortak, ortak kurucu

How it is used

Used in team slides, introductions and job titles. You look for, meet, find or lose a co-founder, and you agree on how to split equity between co-founders. The spelling cofounder without a hyphen is also common, especially in American texts.

Example sentences

  1. I met my co-founder at a hackathon, and we built the first version in three weekends.

  2. The two co-founders split the equity 50/50, which later made decisions difficult.

Common collocations

  • find a co-founder
  • co-founder conflict
  • split equity between co-founders
  • co-founder and CTO
  • founderA person who starts a company and builds it in its early days, usually owning a large part of it and taking the biggest risks.
  • technical co-founderA co-founder who leads the building of the product, especially the software, and usually becomes the company's first CTO.
  • founders' agreementA written contract between co-founders that sets out who owns what, who does what, how decisions are made and what happens if someone leaves.
  • equityOwnership in a company, divided into shares. In startups, equity is what founders, employees and investors hold, and its value grows if the company succeeds.
  • vestingA system in which founders or employees earn their shares or options gradually over time, so that someone who leaves early does not keep everything.

More terms: Founders & Team

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