With all the layoffs, there are going to be a lot of folks who decide that this is their chance to take a swing at being an #entrepreneur and forming a #startup. If that’s you, fantastic. Here’s the single most important piece of advice I can give you:

When you look for a #cofounder (and you should), you want to find someone whose skills *complement* yours that you HAVE WORKED WITH in STRESSFUL SITUATIONS before.

It’s tempting to start a company with people you like. I get it. But here’s the catch: if you haven’t worked with your friend & potential co-founder before, you don’t actually know what they’re like when stuff goes crazy at work. And in startups, things will be crazy all the time.

I founded a company with someone I’d lived with for a few years before. I knew them as someone who was smart, considerate, gentle, empathic, and reliable. What I discovered was instead that they were self-centered, egotistic, a terrible, borderline abusive manager, and so catastrophically flaky they any time something exploded and got genuinely difficult, the only thing I could rely on them for was to not be there when we should have been working on things together.

Starting a company with someone isn’t like being friends. It’s like being the ne plus ultra of coworkers – a comparison I like a lot more than the common “it’s like being married”. It’s not like being married. It’s like being tied together hanging off a bridge with anvils around both of your ankles. You need to work together under intense and constant pressure or you’re both screwed.

So look around. That person who was there with you when you had an impossible deadline to meet? The one who you always turn to when you have problems? The quiet person that folks often overlook who does all the actual hard shit? These are the kinds of people you want to be thinking about, not the office entertainer/fun person that everyone thinks is hilarious.

Your co-founders should come from the strongest, most effective of your work relationships. Most startups fail. And they fail for all kinds of reasons. But the most common reason I’ve seen is that co-founder relationships fall apart. Friends become bitter enemies. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to a lot of people I know. The co-founder relationships that are most likely to succeed are the ones forged under the shared pressure of having worked together in difficult circumstances.