Start-Up Mediation
Mediation comes up a lot in court cases, particularly family law, but it has broad application in some surprising places. Particularly in the Bay area, there are a lot of start-ups, meaning small businesses that are recently launched and are moving quickly. Start-ups are more reliant on the people involved getting along than the majority of businesses, because often there are only a few people in a start-up, and there’s no ability to transfer conflicting parties to another team or location. Further, things in start-ups move fast, for better or worse. A company may be tiny and modest one week and then, after a round of funding does particularly well, suddenly a mid-sized company that desperately needs to hire and expand.
Mediation shines here by providing a way for small conflicts to get resolved and not become large conflicts. The traditional founder’s conflict in start-ups has spelled doom for many otherwise promising companies; this happens when people who founded the company suddenly discover they have very different ideas about where the company goes now, and it often happens during a transition from tiny to small, small to medium, or similar. Two (or more) people who used to be friends may suddenly, violently disagree about whether to accept an acquisition, whether to IPO, whether to fire a particular employee, or even what the company should be selling. Left unsolved, these conflicts can and often do destroy the company. This is the nobody-wins model, equivalent in many ways to a zero-sum situation from game theory.
One of the things a good mediator can do to help is to provide a knowledgeable and professional point of contact to help solve issues between principals as they arise. In our opinion, you do definitely need a mediator with domain-specific knowledge for this, since someone who doesn’t know much about start-ups will have no idea why a couple of programmers are so angry about IP assignments or why an angel known to hate a certain VC is a problem. Start-ups are a strange and tiny world, and often people with outstanding technical skills don’t have as much experience handling what can feel like very personal, very intense conflicts.
Far River is well situated to help with these issues. We provide knowledgeable mediators, and are accomplished at translating between the domains of technical skill and people-skills. We’ve also got enough experience to be able to customize the process for where a start-up is in its cycle, and help the parties anticipate problems that may crop up in the next step.
If your start-up is having problems, especially conflicts between the people involved, think about reaching out to us today. These things are a lot easier to fix before they blow up, and even if they’ve already blown up, we can help you put things back together and keep moving.
