How To Choose A Business Partner That Will Make You Both Rich
“If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.”
Life is a single-player game. But who you work with along the way has as much of an impact on your success as what you choose to do. And it has far more of an impact than how hard you work.
Great partners, mentors, and bosses take you places you never thought you’d go. And those relationships compound over time. The longer you’ve known someone, the less friction there is to go after really big wins.
Here are some frameworks from wealth creators for choosing the right partners.
Naval: Find People With Intelligence, Energy, And Integrity.
Naval Ravikant has a three-filter system for choosing who to work with. His filters are intelligence, energy, and integrity.
Intelligence
First, you need someone who’s going to lead you in the right direction. You need someone intelligent.
This doesn’t mean they’re a genius, or they know everything. But they should be smart within their particular circle of competence - an area of expertise that ideally complements your own.
Energy
Next, they need to be energetic. Because as Naval says, “the world is full smart, lazy people.”
If you in the mid or later stage of your career, then partner with someone who’s younger and far more energetic than you. You can bring experience and wisdom, and they can bring raw energy.
Integrity
Finally, they must have integrity. Naval defines integrity as “what someone does, despite what they say they do.”
You do not want to work with someone who will stab in the back for an extra buck. Building anything great is incredibly hard, and takes a really long time. You don’t want the effort wasted because you partnered with a crook who said one thing but did another.
How can you tell if someone has integrity? Naval says if a person talks a lot about how moral, ethical, and high integrity they are, the less likely those statements are to be true. High-integrity people don’t go around talking about it. They just make deals and decisions that are always ethical.
Here’s Naval talking about these three filters in the article called Pick Partners With Intelligence, Energy and Integrity:
“You need someone who is smart, or they’ll head in the wrong direction. And you’re not going to end up in the right place. You need someone high-energy because the world is full of smart, lazy people… And then high integrity is the most important because otherwise if you’ve got the other two, what you have is you have a smart and hard-working crook, who’s eventually going to cheat you. So, you have to figure out if the person is high-integrity.”
If you can find someone with all three characteristics who you also get along with, your odds of getting rich over time increase dramatically.
Munger: Work Only With Those You Respect And Admire.
Charlie Munger has three rules for your career:
“Don't sell anything you wouldn't buy yourself. Don't work for anyone you don't respect and admire. Work only with people you enjoy.”
Work should not be miserable. Life is too short to be chained to a desk with a job you hate. That’s why you want to work only with those people you respect, admire, and enjoy.
So, go and identify the people you look up to. Make a list. Then, find a way to offer them value pro bono in the form of a product, service, or expertise.
Twitter is a great place to start. You can access almost anyone for free if you offer value.
Do that successfully and there’s a good chance the person you admire will allow you to work with them in a larger capacity. And at the very least, you’ll be on their radar.
Buffett: Work For Your Idols.
Warren Buffett has a simple model to figure out who to work with: go work for the people you admire the most.
There is no point taking a job or choosing a career you don’t love just climb the corporate ladder. One, you’ll be miserable. And two, you’ll be beaten by the other person who actually loves what it is you hate.
Instead, go work for your idols. Buffett says:
“People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most. It's crazy to take little in-between jobs just because they look good on your résumé. That's like saving sex for old age. Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can.”
That’s what choosing a partner is all about - giving yourself the best chance you can to change both your lives.
Dr. Julie Gurner: Find someone Aligned With Your Vision.
There’s one more critical criteria for choosing a business partner: they need to share your vision for the thing you’re building.
This isn’t always easy - especially in a creative endeavor. Sometimes it’s hard for even one person to get clear on the vision. And it’s much harder still to communicate that vision to someone else so they see it too. But it’s necessary, because if you and your partner aren’t 100 percent clearly aligned on what the vision is, there’s going to be trouble.
Executive performance coach Julie Gurner reminded me on X:
“I can't tell you how many intelligent, energetic and integrous people are not suited to be your business partner because they don't have alignment in so many areas.”
In my experience working with my wife, this alignment on vision is more important than work style, or any other differences in process. We work in different ways, but both understand what it is we’re building. You and your business partner should too.
Longterm Relationships Compound Just Like Money.
The business partners you choose matter. This is because relationships compound over time just like money does. The longer you’ve known someone, the bigger the deals you can take on with that person.
Here’s Naval talking about this in an article called Play Long-term Games With Long-term People:
“Long-term games are good not just for compound interest, they’re also good for trust…When you have been doing business with somebody, you’ve been friends with somebody for ten years, twenty years, thirty years, it just gets better and better because you trust them so easily. The friction goes down, you can do bigger, and bigger things together…Whether it’s goodwill, or love, or relationships, or money.”
The older the relationship, the less friction there is to build bigger and bigger things. This is one of the major downsides to switching industries or cities. With all-new people, you reset to zero. You have to start compounding relationships with new people from scratch.
And like all compounding, the greatest returns are on the backend of the relationship period. This means you should be doing bigger and bigger things with the same people as you get older. And it’ll be fun because you already know and like working with them.
If you invest in good partners - ones you admire, who are intelligent, energetic, and high-integrity - you’ll do more than you think is possible.
Start now.
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SOURCES
Naval Ravikant: Pick Partners With Intelligence, Energy and Integrity
Naval Ravikant: Play Long-term Games With Long-term People
Warren Buffett quote can be found here.
Charlie Munger quote can be founder here.