Mistake #5: The Three Monkeys Make a Terrible Co-Founding Team
This is the fifth post in a series about the mistakes I made starting up, and what I’d tell myself if I could go back.
There is an image most of us grew up with. Three monkeys, seated side by side. One covers its mouth. One covers its eyes. One covers its ears.
Speak no evil. See no evil. Hear no evil.
It is a deeply embedded cultural value in India, and in many parts of Asia. The idea that a good person does not amplify negativity. Does not call out what is wrong. Does not dwell on the bad. Stays positive. Stays constructive. Does not rock the boat.
It is also, as a startup operating philosophy, a near-perfect recipe for failure.
What It Looks Like in Practice
The three monkeys do not announce themselves. They show up quietly, dressed as virtue.
Speak no evil looks like not calling out the flaw in your own approach during a planning meeting. You have a nagging sense that the go-to-market is not right, or that the pricing is off, or that a core assumption has not been tested. But someone worked hard on it. It would feel like stepping on toes. You tell yourself someone else has thought this through. It will work itself out.
And there is a version of this that goes even deeper than avoidance. In some cultures, including ours, there is a genuine belief that naming a bad outcome invites it. If someone predicts a product will fail and it does, the prediction itself gets blamed. That is not accountability. That is superstition. And it is a remarkably effective way of ensuring that no one ever tells you the truth about your own company.
It does not work itself out.
See no evil looks like watching a competitor do something that is working and deciding it does not count. They are gaming the algorithm. They are buying reviews. They are growing through tactics that feel beneath you. And so you look away and return to your own path, telling yourself that only the truly good product wins in the long run.
Sometimes that is true. More often, you just gave a competitor a head start while you were busy feeling superior about your methods.
Hear no evil looks like getting a bad review from a customer and finding a reason not to listen to it. They are the wrong customer. They did not use the product correctly. They have an unusual use case. One data point is not a trend.
It also shows up inside the founding team. Sometimes a co-founder hears the same bad feedback and privately agrees with it. But rather than say so and create friction, they stay quiet. The problem gets two votes of silence instead of one. And so it compounds.
Except when it is. And you won’t know the difference if you keep explaining away every data point that does not fit the story you want to be true.
Why This Happens
This is not about intelligence. Most founders who fall into this pattern are smart people who are working hard and genuinely want their company to succeed.
It is about how we are wired, culturally and psychologically.
In India especially, confrontation is not a neutral act. It carries social weight. Calling out a problem in a shared plan means someone owns that problem, someone might lose face, someone’s effort gets questioned. In a culture that values harmony and indirect communication, the path of least resistance is almost always to not say the thing.
And then there is the psychological layer that has nothing to do with culture. Founders are, by definition, people who have bet on an idea. The whole enterprise requires a certain suspension of doubt. The cognitive bias toward confirming what you already believe is strong in everyone. In founders it is often stronger because the alternative, admitting the idea might be wrong, is not just intellectually uncomfortable. It threatens the entire reason you are doing this.
So the three monkeys become a coping mechanism. A way of maintaining conviction in the face of contradictory evidence.
The problem is that conviction built on ignored evidence is not conviction. It is denial with a better PR strategy.
The Cost of Each Monkey
Speaking no evil means problems compound. A go-to-market flaw that could have been caught and corrected in month two becomes a structural issue by month eight. A co-founder dynamic that felt awkward to raise becomes an existential conflict. A pricing model that was never really stress-tested becomes the reason the unit economics never work.
Small things that were never said become big things that cannot be fixed.
Seeing no evil means you cede learning. Your competitors, ethical or otherwise, are running experiments in the market every day. When something works for them, that is a signal about the market. Not necessarily a signal to copy, but a signal to understand. Looking away from what works because you don’t like how it was done leaves you operating on a smaller set of information than the market actually contains.
You do not have to admire what your competitors do. But you do have to watch it.
Hearing no evil means customers stop telling you things. Not because they have nothing to say, but because their feedback does not visibly land. The founder who consistently explains away negative feedback trains their team, their advisors, and eventually their customers to stop offering it. You end up in a room where everyone agrees with you, which feels like validation and is actually the most dangerous place a founder can be.
The Version That Nearly Got Me
I did all three. Not all at once, not dramatically, just enough, just often enough, to miss the signal exactly when I needed it most.
For me, the sharpest version of this was hearing no evil.
Early on, I had customers give feedback that pointed clearly toward a problem with how we had positioned the product. Not a product problem. A framing problem. The right people were not immediately understanding what we did and why it mattered for them.
But the feedback came from customers I had mentally categorized as not quite the ideal fit. And so, I discounted it. They didn’t fully understand the vision. They were evaluating it through the wrong lens. The right customers would get it.
Months later, when I finally stopped explaining and started listening, the feedback from my “ideal” customers was saying the same thing.
The customers I had written off were not the wrong customers. They were early signal I had chosen not to receive. A selective bias.
What I’d Tell Myself Now
Build a habit of naming the uncomfortable thing first. In every planning meeting, every strategy discussion, every co-founder conversation, make it someone’s job to say what is not working or what has not been tested. Not as an exercise in pessimism. As an exercise in intellectual honesty.
Separate your competitor’s tactics from your values. You do not have to use every tactic a competitor uses. But you do have to understand why it is working. Dismissing competitor behavior because it feels beneath you is just another form of looking away. Watch, understand, then decide.
Treat negative customer feedback as the most expensive data you will ever get for free. A customer who tells you something is wrong has done you a service. A customer who stops using the product and never says why has not. Create conditions where people feel safe telling you things you do not want to hear.
Find at least one person whose job it is to challenge you. An advisor, a co-founder, a board member, a peer. Someone who will not soften the thing that needs to be said. Someone who is not trying to protect your feelings. This person is more valuable than five people who tell you the product is great.
In India, name the cultural bias explicitly. When you notice yourself or your team avoiding a hard conversation because it feels culturally uncomfortable, say that out loud. “I know this is awkward to raise, and I’m going to raise it anyway.” That one sentence does a lot of work. It names the discomfort without letting it win.
The Broader Lesson
Startups run on information. The quality of your decisions is bounded by the quality of the information you are willing to receive.
Every time you speak no evil, you lose information about your own plan. Every time you see no evil, you lose information about the market. Every time you hear no evil, you lose information about your customers.
The three monkeys are not protecting you. They are just making the eventual collision with reality more expensive.
The startup that confronts reality clearly, even when it is uncomfortable, especially when it is uncomfortable, is the one that gets to keep adjusting. The one that looks away does not get that chance.
Optimism about outcomes is a virtue. Optimism about inputs is a liability.
You can believe the company will succeed. You should. But believing it will succeed despite the flaw you have not named, the competitor you have not watched, the customer you have not listened to. That is not optimism. That is the three monkeys at work.
The bottom line: The cultural instinct to avoid speaking, seeing, and hearing evil is deeply human and specifically sharp in the Indian context. In startups, it manifests as not naming flaws, not watching competitors, and not listening to bad feedback. All three compound over time. All three are correctable. The correction starts with naming what you have been avoiding.
Where have you caught yourself doing one of these three? I’d genuinely like to hear.
I’m Gopi Krishna, founder of Hyperleap AI, where we build enterprise-grade conversational AI but for small and medium businesses. This is part of an ongoing series on the mistakes I made in my first years as a founder, written for anyone thinking about starting something of their own. Subscribe to Second Order AI on Substack to follow along.