Fit Is Not What You Think It Is
The phrase "partner-founder fit" is everywhere this week. Almost no one means the same thing by it. And the version most founders carry into the deal is the version that costs them twelve months of runway.
The Partnership Hire Is Usually a Confession
Founders in 2026 are hiring partnership managers either six months too early or twelve months too late. The cost of both mistakes is approximately the same, and neither error is actually about timing.
The Renewal Is the Tell
The 2026 Trust Barometer shows seventy percent of people now default to trusting only the familiar. That same logic is quietly deciding which partnerships founders renew, and which better options never get evaluated at all.
The Word "Strategic" Stopped Meaning Anything This Week
A week of press releases about strategic partnerships obscures the real reason most of them fail: trust was never built between the people signing.
The Agreement You'll Write After the First Good Quarter
Founders defer structure until revenue arrives. Revenue is precisely the moment structure becomes most expensive to establish. The window for a clean conversation is shorter than they expect.
The Ownership Conversation You Postponed Is the Lawsuit You'll Lose
The VHS founder did not lose his company in a courtroom. He lost it in the meeting where nobody established what would happen when one partner decided it was time to go.
The Friction Was the Filter
AI is filling partnership pipelines faster than ever. The failure rate hasn't moved. The friction founders are eliminating was never the problem, it was the filter.
What Founders Mean When They Say Misalignment
Misalignment is the word that makes partnership failure sound structural and inevitable. Most of the time, it describes the consequence of conversations the founder chose not to have.
The Deal You Closed in the Room
Conference deals select for people who are excellent at communicating upside. Partnership value is determined by how the other party behaves when things go wrong.
The Dashboard Is Not the Conversation
In 2026, founders have more partnership management tools than ever. The ones managing most diligently are often the most surprised when those partnerships collapse.
The Partnership Surplus
Capital is migrating from acquisitions to partnerships. AI is flooding the funnel. The selection framework has not kept pace, and the compression does not improve the outcome.
The Agreement Is Not the Partnership
The most widely read piece of legal advisory published this month contains a sentence that should stop every founder cold: earn-outs are inherently litigation-prone. What that document describes is the architecture of a relationship that was never quite built.