Two Triangles That Make or Break Cofounders

Trust, Drama and the Stories You Tell Each Other.

Trust doesn’t usually disappear in a big explosion.
In cofounder relationships, it leaks out slowly: through the meeting you never quite finish, the decision that gets made in a side chat, the “It’s fine” that very obviously isn’t. Under pressure, even the most committed founding teams drift from building trust into playing out drama.

Two deceptively simple psychological models illuminate this shift: Matthew Davis’ Trust Triangle from The Trust Triangle: How to Manage Humans at Work, and psychiatrist Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle. Each offers a different lens on what is really happening in those late-night Slack arguments and tense board debriefs. One describes how trust is built and maintained; the other exposes how humans act when that trust feels threatened.

For cofounders, learning to recognise which triangle you’re standing in may be the difference between a “dream team” that stretches and repairs… and one that ends in a bitter, expensive divorce.

Story one: the launch that broke something

Let’s start with a story.

Amira and Josh are cofounders of a creative SaaS platform. Amira is the visionary CEO, always selling three steps ahead. Josh is the product and operations brain, grounded but sometimes slow to commit. They’ve been friends for years and regularly describe each other as “work spouse”.

They are gearing up for a big feature launch that a major partner has been promised. Amira has gone out early with bold messaging. Josh has been quietly saying, “We’re tight on timelines,” but hasn’t pushed as hard as he feels. A week before launch, a critical bug appears. It’s fixable, but not in time.

The partner is furious, the team is exhausted, and the launch is postponed.

Here is where their relationship forks. In one path, they stand firmly inside the Trust Triangle. In the other, they slide into the Drama Triangle. The event is the same; the story they tell about it is what changes everything.

The Trust Triangle: the architecture of staying on the same side

The Trust Triangle, as articulated by Matthew Davis, frames trust at work as a dynamic, practical construct rather than something vague and emotional. It invites leaders to ask: what does it take for another person to decide to trust me here, in this context, on this decision?

At its heart are three interlocking elements that show up again and again in strong working relationships:

• Clarity: Do we have the same understanding of what we’re doing, why, and who is responsible?
• Competence: Do I reliably do what I say I will, and do you believe I’m up to the job?
• Care: Do you feel that I genuinely have your interests, feelings and constraints in mind, not just my own?

When the Trust Triangle is strong between cofounders, it functions like a scaffold around the relationship:

• Clarity means decisions, roles and expectations are explicit rather than assumed.
• Competence means each founder can relax into their lane, trusting the other to handle theirs.
• Care means difficult truths can be spoken without the fear that the relationship itself is on the line.

In our launch story, the trust-rich version might sound like this the day after the disaster:

“We need to understand what broke here. I can see how much you’ve been holding, and I know you didn’t want this outcome. From my side, I didn’t listen hard enough when you flagged the risk. Let’s map the decisions, the assumptions, and the signals we missed. And then let’s agree how we communicate risk earlier next time.”

Notice what is happening in that conversation:

• Clarity is being rebuilt (what actually happened, what signals were missed).
• Competence is assumed and reinforced (“I know you didn’t want this outcome”; “I can see how much you’ve been holding”).
• Care is explicit (“I know this hurt you too”; “we’re in this together”).

Conflict, in this frame, becomes a shared problem to solve, not a verdict on either person’s worth.

The Drama Triangle: when threat takes over the story

Karpman’s Drama Triangle, by contrast, isn’t about trust directly. It’s about how people unconsciously respond to psychological threat: criticism, shame, fear of abandonment, the sense of being unseen or overrun. Under that pressure, we slide into one of three roles:

• Victim: “This is happening to me. I’m powerless, stuck, hard done by.”
• Persecutor: “This is your fault. You’re the problem. I must criticise, control or dominate to feel safe.”
• Rescuer: “I’ll save everyone. I’ll over-function, fix, soothe or smooth things over, even at my expense.”

In the Drama Triangle, each role temporarily soothes something inside us:

• Victim avoids responsibility and the pain of agency.
• Persecutor avoids vulnerability by attacking or controlling.
• Rescuer avoids their own discomfort by focusing on others’ problems.

But together, these roles create a looping script that never resolves the real issue. In cofounder relationships, this script can be devastating.

Now replay the product launch through the Drama Triangle. The day after the disaster, the conversation goes very differently:

• Josh as Victim: “You pushed us into deadlines we couldn’t meet. You never listen when I say we’re not ready. I always end up carrying the can.”
• Amira as Persecutor: “If you’d flagged this properly earlier instead of dithering, we would have had options. I can’t keep covering for your lack of urgency.”
• A board member steps in as Rescuer: “Look, both of you are too emotional. Let me handle the partner relationship and we’ll quietly put a PM in between you so this doesn’t keep happening.”

Everyone feels momentarily justified or relieved. Nobody has actually addressed:

• the missing clarity of risk acceptance,
• the shaky competence in planning and communication,
• or the lack of care each felt in the run-up.

The event becomes a character judgement: “You’re reckless” versus “You’re obstructive”.
The next disagreement doesn’t start at neutral; it starts loaded with this unspoken narrative.

Same triangle, different impact: what they do to a founding team

Both triangles, in a sense, are social maps. One describes the conditions under which adults can relate as peers and partners. The other describes what happens when we forget we are adults and regress into drama.

For cofounders, the impact shows up in specific, recognisable patterns.

How the Trust Triangle shows up between cofounders

When two founders are operating inside the Trust Triangle, you often see:

• Robust but clean disagreement
  • “I see it completely differently, and here’s why.”
  • Voices can get heated, but the underlying assumption is, “We’re both good people trying to solve a hard problem.”
• Negotiated roles and lanes
  • There is clarity about who decides what, and how dissent is raised and resolved.
  • Competence is acknowledged explicitly: “This is your call; I trust your read.”
• Repair after rupture
  • When something goes wrong, they return to clarity, competence, care.
  • “I’m sorry for how I said that. The content stands, but the way I delivered it was harsh.”

This doesn’t mean there is no conflict. It means conflict is metabolised into learning and better agreements.

How the Drama Triangle infects cofounder dynamics

When founders are trapped in the Drama Triangle, you’ll often notice:

• Recycled arguments
  • The surface issue keeps changing (hiring, roadmap, fundraising), but the emotional script is identical.
  • One founder feels unheard; the other feels undermined; someone else is pulled in to referee.
• Triangulation and alliances
  • Instead of speaking directly, each founder vents to team members, advisors or investors.
  • People start taking sides, even if subtly. The company’s nervous system becomes jittery.
• Role rigidity
  • One founder is “always” the difficult one (Persecutor), the other “always” the overwhelmed one (Victim).
  • A Rescuer (COO, chair, investor, coach) becomes the unofficial emotional caretaker, burning out quietly.

The business costs are non-trivial: decision latency, talent attrition, strategic drift. But underneath those, the personal cost is often shame and grief: “We were supposed to be the dream team.”

Where the two triangles overlap

It’s tempting to think of these models as opposites: one “good”, one “bad”. But they actually intersect in a more nuanced way. They both, in their own language, are pointing to the same underlying needs.

• Both recognise vulnerability
  • The Drama Triangle exposes how people react when they feel vulnerable but don’t have safe ways to express it.
  • The Trust Triangle creates the conditions where that vulnerability can be owned without collapsing into drama.
• Both are relational
  • Neither model is about “who you are as a person” in isolation.
  • They are about patterns between people, especially under stress.
• Both can be used diagnostically
  • Feeling stuck in repeated conflicts? You can ask: “Which role am I in?” and “Which leg of trust is wobbly here: clarity, competence or care?”

For cofounders, the powerful insight is that the very same moment can be understood through both lenses.
When Josh snaps, “You never listen to risk,” he might be sitting in a Victim role and reacting to a breach of clarity and care. The Drama Triangle helps name the behavioural posture; the Trust Triangle helps define the work to do to repair it.

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The emotional engine room of cofounder conflict

Cofounder relationships are uniquely intense. You are:

• financially entangled;
• identity-bound (“this company is us”);
• and often over-indexed on each other for validation and support.

Because of that, seemingly small slips can feel very high-stakes. When your cofounder cancels your 1:1 three weeks in a row, your nervous system might not interpret that as a scheduling issue. It might tell a story: “I don’t matter as much anymore.”

From there, the two triangles diverge:

• In a Trust Triangle response, you might say:
  • “I’m noticing we keep missing our time together. That’s the space where I bring concerns and stay aligned with you. Can we recommit or redesign how we stay synced?”
• In a Drama Triangle response, you might either:
  • Slide into Victim: “You’re obviously too busy for me now, so I just stopped bringing things up.”
  • Or cross into Persecutor: “You clearly don’t care about this partnership; you just do what you want.”

The internal feeling could be almost identical in both cases—hurt and insecure. The difference is whether you have enough trust in the container (Clarity about what that 1:1 is for, Competence in how you both show up, Care for each other’s constraints) to say so directly without attacking or collapsing.

Moving from drama back to trust

The good news: cofounders drift into drama all the time and still build great companies.
The critical skill is not “never enter the Drama Triangle” but “notice when you’re in it, and know how to exit back towards trust”.

Here are some practical pivots founders can make.

1. Name the role you’re in

Silently ask: “Right now, am I trying to be the helpless one, the righteous one, or the fixer?”

• If you’re in Victim, experiment with one small act of agency.
  • Instead of, “There’s nothing I can do,” try, “One thing I could do is… but I’m hesitant because…”
• If you’re in Persecutor, slow down and name the underlying fear.
  • “I’m coming in hot because I’m scared we’re risking everything on this decision.”
• If you’re in Rescuer, pause before offering help.
  • “I’m tempted to jump in and fix this. Do you actually want my help, or do you need space to own it?”

You’re not confessing this out loud to your cofounder (unless your relationship is robust enough to hold that). You’re creating enough self-awareness to choose a different move.

2. Ask the Trust Triangle question: what’s actually missing?

When you feel yourself blaming or withdrawing, translate it into trust language:

• “Do we have a clarity problem here?”
  • Are we truly aligned on what success looks like, on who owns what, on what “done” means?
• “Do we have a competence problem here?”
  • Is one of us out of depth for this phase of the company or this decision, and we’re dancing around it?
• “Do we have a care problem here?”
  • Has one of us stopped feeling seen, safe, or considered in the way decisions are made?

Often a drama-laden argument (“You don’t respect me”) is a care deficit in disguise (“I need more inclusion in these conversations”).

3. Make explicit repair part of the relationship

Healthy cofounder pairs treat repair as a core practice, not an emergency measure. That means:

• Having regular, scheduled “relationship retros” that are not about the product or the numbers, but about how you are working together.
• Using shared language: “I think we’re slipping into drama here; can we pause and ask what’s missing from trust?”
• Normalising apologies that respect both content and process: “I stand by the decision; I don’t stand by the way I spoke to you.”

Over time, this builds a meta-trust: confidence that even if things get messy, you both have the skills and commitment to find your way back.

The invisible cofounder: your shared story

Every founding team has an invisible third cofounder: the story they tell about themselves.

• “We’re the scrappy underdogs who outwork everyone.”
• “We’re the grown-ups who bring order to chaos.”
• “We’re the geniuses who see what others don’t.”

When trust is strong, that story is a resource. Under stress, it can ossify into something brittle and unforgiving. If your shared identity does not allow for vulnerability—“We are the ones who never drop the ball”—then any mistake becomes identity-threatening. That’s fertile ground for drama.

Bringing the Trust Triangle into your explicit narrative can help soften that:

• “We are a founding team who say hard things kindly, who repair quickly, and who prefer clarity over comfort.”

Equally, naming the Drama Triangle gives you a way to talk about the patterns without making them moral failures:

• “We went full Victim–Persecutor in that board prep. Let’s rewind and try again from trust.”

Your shared story becomes a place where both models live: the commitment to trust, and the humility to notice when you’ve slipped into drama.

Reflection questions for cofounders

Take these into a conversation with your cofounder, a journal, or your next session with a coach or advisor who understands founder dynamics:

1. When was the last time you handled a significant setback from a place of trust?
   • What did each of you do that reinforced clarity, competence and care?
   • How did it feel in your body compared to your “standard” conflict patterns?
2. Which Drama Triangle role is your personal “home base” under pressure?
   • Victim, Persecutor or Rescuer—where do you recognise yourself most?
   • How has that role served you historically, and how is it now costing you in this partnership?
3. What is one area of your relationship that currently lacks clarity?
   • Decision rights, time commitment, risk appetite, communication norms?
   • What specific conversation are you avoiding because you’re afraid it will rock the boat?
4. Where is competence quietly in question?
   • Is there a domain where one of you has outgrown the role, or is stretched beyond capacity?
   • What would it take to be radically honest about that without making it a character judgement?
5. How do you each feel cared for—or not—by the other at this stage of the company?
   • What are the small behaviours that land as “You’ve got me”?
   • What are the small behaviours that land as “I’m on my own here”?
6. What shared story about your founding team might be pushing you towards drama?
   • Does your self-image leave room for mistakes, doubt and repair?
   • If not, what new story would allow you to be both ambitious and human?

A next step if this hits home

If you recognised yourself or your cofounder anywhere in these triangles, you’re not alone—and you’re not doomed. Nearly every founding pair or trio cycles through trust and drama; the difference between those who stay “dream team” and those who end in divorce is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of a shared language and practice for navigating it.

From Dream Team to Divorce? A Cofounder’s Guide to Conflict, Exit and Everything Between was written for founders exactly like you: ambitious, committed, and painfully aware that the hardest part of building a company isn’t the product or the pitch deck—it’s the person across the table. Inside, you’ll find scripts for difficult conversations, diagnostic tools built from models like the Trust Triangle and the Drama Triangle, and real stories from cofounders who found ways through tension, exit and everything in between.

If you want to catch these tools early and apply them to your own partnership before patterns harden, join the wait list for From Dream Team to Divorce?. You’ll get early access to resources, reflection prompts, and practical exercises you can use with your cofounder, your leadership team or your coach. Consider it your first act of stepping out of drama and back into trust—on purpose.