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I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.

Happy Tuesday, founders,

How was everyone’s summer? As I wrapped up my annual leave break last week with my beloved co-founders, I kept replaying what’s made our relationships feel unbreakable over the years.

Co-founder relationships are the backbone of any company. Businesses are people businesses; your core team is the foundation that helps you ride out storms, dry spells, pivots, and the unpredictable weather of the market.

We obsess over product–market fit but often forget founder–market fit. And the data is blunt: “people problems” consistently rank among the top reasons young companies die. Noam Wasserman’s research suggests that up to 65% of startup failures trace back to co-founder conflict, a pattern echoed by venture investors who cite team dynamics as the leading cause of collapse.

For four decades, Dr. John Gottman has run tightly controlled, longitudinal studies of couples in his Love Lab since 1986. Partners discuss real disagreements while researchers capture second-by-second emotion codes, video, and physiology (heart rate, skin conductance, movement), then follow them for years to see who thrives or divorces.

In this piece, I’m borrowing from Gottman’s Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - including the magic ratio in conflict, bids for connection, and shared power - and applying them to co-founder relationships.

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‘Love Maps’ are the base layer of Gottman’s Sound Relationship House: partners who keep rich, up-to-date maps of each other tend to be more resilient and stable. Research also finds that couples with higher emotional intelligence are more familiar with each other’s inner worlds - life goals, dreams, and worries.

What it means for co-founders: You can’t collaborate with someone you don’t truly know. Work Maps are the current snapshots of each other’s inner world so you don’t misread or hit the same landmines - energy patterns, ambitions, triggers, and life constraints. Try to create a living Founder Operating Manual (FOM) to capture each other’s peak hours, decision styles, non-negotiables, stress triggers, family realities, motivational currency, and red lines. Each founder updates three bullets and reviews the others aloud. Before your next 1:1, open with: “What’s important behind this priority for you right now?”

In Dr. Gottman’s research, stable couples spend roughly five seconds in positive or neutral affect for every one second in negative affect during conflict - a 5:1 ratio he calls the “magic ratio”. When that ratio dips below 5:1 within a conflict, distress and separation risk rise.

Positive moments include: agreement fragments, curious questions, accurate summarising, brief humour, solution-oriented language, and a calm, regulated tone.

Negative moments include: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling (the Four Horsemen), eye-rolls, hostile sarcasm, exasperated sighs, and repeated interruptions.

What it means for co-founders: In your next hard conversation, notice when negatives start to outweigh positives, and trigger a repair to rebalance. For example:

Bids - the requests to connect, are what Gottman calls “the fundamental unit of emotional communication.” They can be small or big, verbal or non-verbal - anything from a light touch, to a question, to a playful tease.

In Gottman’s lab, couples with strong relationships turned toward bids about 86% of the time; those who later divorced did so only 33% of the time. Long-term resilience lives in the small moments.

What it means for co-founders: Co-founder bids might look like “got 5?”, a self-deprecating joke in a 1:1, or a casual ‘quick sanity check?’ Make the small stuff count - especially during hard weeks. These micro-connections are what actually build (and protect) the relationship.

Gottman shows that accepting influence predicts healthier, more stable relationships. In his study of newlywed couples, he found that when a partner consistently resisted their partner’s influence, the marriage had an 81% chance of failing over time.

The commitment required between co-founders is not unlike the most highly committed and tested relationship - a marriage.

And the reality is: within a few years of building the company, you’ll all evolve - your views on finance, hiring standards, product bets, and even the vision will, too.

If wisdom doesn’t come with age, it arrives by testing - especially when they are in forms of bad cashflow, burnouts, value clash, major investments, conflict, or betrayal…

What it means for co-founders:

We covered 1–4 today - work maps, the 5:1 magic ratio, responding to bids, and shared power. Next Tuesday, we’ll tackle 5–7 - soft start-ups & repairs, dreams within conflict, and shared meaning between you and your co-founders.

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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