Cofounders are effectively married, so why do we not invest in couples therapy for startups? It works.

There is no more fundamentally important relationship inside a company than between its cofounders, and no area in which things can get more royally screwed. By extension, that applies with only a very slight reduction to the founding team and/or leadership team, the group of people with varying functional areas who through their relationships guide the direction and success of the company.

Market, strategy, culture, all of these things are important. But none of them can overcome bad relationships within the leadership of a company.

So why do we, as founders and investors, not invest in nurturing and securing those relationships? And in the rare cases where we do consciously, why do we expect success from people without any professional expertise?

We rely on board members, usually business leaders all, and the founding team itself to fix these matters. This is like handing a drill to Mike from Accounting and asking him to fix your cavity. He's not trained in dentistry, so you don't hand him a drill.

A board and founding team are not doctors in psychology (much less do they possess the required dispassion to do the job with objectivity), so why in the world do we so unquestioningly trust them with managing the psychological dynamics of the leadership team, the single largest lever in our organizations?

I'm piling on here, as it is definitely encouraging to see groups like Freestyle Capital investing in the mental health of their founders. This is critically important and they are pushing the envelope, far, to do even that, but it's about more than the mental well-being of the individual. We need to go farther, and invest in the mental well-being of the leadership team (if not the organization).