partnerships
Founders today are better at meeting other founders than at any point in the history of entrepreneurship. The result is a generation who leave every dinner with twelve new LinkedIn connections and zero partnerships.
partnerships
69% of companies are increasing partnership investment this year. Only 42% can measure what those partnerships produce. The gap is not a tooling problem. It is a belief problem that has been structural since the first conversation.
partnerships
Sixty-nine percent of companies plan to increase partnership investment in 2026. Only forty-two percent can measure which ones are working. That gap is not a data problem. It is a structural confession about how those partnerships were built.
partnerships
The 2026 partnership investment wave is the largest scale experiment in partner-led growth the B2B world has ever run. Most of it will fail for the same reason it always has.
partnerships
69% of B2B companies are increasing partnership investment in 2026. Only 42% can measure what those partnerships produce. That gap is not a technology problem.
partnerships
Databricks' co-founder named the pattern at Disrupt 2026: the pilot was never the hard part. The same failure architecture is running through founder partnerships, and most founders haven't noticed.
partnerships
Approximately 70% of business partnerships fail within the first five years. Every piece of advice written in response tells founders to do better research before signing. That is not where the work is.
founders
63% of new C corps in Q2 2026 were solo-founded. That number is shaping operators who have never developed the muscle for evaluating a partner, and whose first partnership will be built on instincts calibrated for independence, not relationship.
partnerships
Partner-led growth accounts for 30 to 50 percent of revenue at leading B2B companies. Founders are reading that statistic and signing deals faster. That is the mechanism that makes those deals fail.
partnerships
In 2026, the B2B world has settled on a consensus: partner-led growth is the default model, and the prescribed response is infrastructure. Most founders build the stack before solving selection, and AI means they are wrong at a larger scale, faster.
partnerships
Founders write their partnership agreements at the exact moment they are least qualified to write them. Peak trust is the worst condition under which to structure the terms that will govern a partnership at its lowest point.
partnerships
Nvidia and OpenAI spent months designing a $100 billion infrastructure deal and then walked away from it because neither party resolved the question of who controls what. Most founders are running the same negotiation right now at a different scale.