If two people start a company are they founders or co-founders?
Is the word founder used only if there is one person starting a company? If you have two or more, are you automatically labeled as co-founders?
I see a lot of people use co-founder when there are more than one starting team members, but the founders of our country weren't called the "Founding Co-Founders".
Also, if you type and/or say the word founder ten times, it starts to lose all meaning.
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Joe and Jim start a company making widgetry for social networks.
Joe is a founder. Jim is a founder. Joe and Jim are the founders of the social network widgetry company.
Jim is Joe's co-founder. Joe is Jim's co-founder.
The "co-" prefix should really only be used where it removes confusion and makes it clear that there is more than one founder.
Hahaha, I overhead some baked high school kids in Starbucks today have exactly that conversation. (But I think the word was "snickerdoodle".)
From a linguistic perspective, the phenomenon that a word after frequent repetition seems to lose its meaning is connected with the very nature of words. A word as a unit of language has three characteristics:
* It has form, i.e. it is shaped out of sounds or, in the case of written language, out of letters (characters).
* It has function, which (among other things) means that it operates in a meaningful sentence.
* It has meaning, which implies that it refers to a certain unit of thought (a concept or an idea) within a context.
However, when a word is repeated over and over again, it is in fact only the form which is repeated. There is no sentence, so the function of the word is eliminated. Its meaning, too, is effectively eliminated, because there is no context. A few repetitions will leave the language user's memory and expectation intact: he remembers the meaning and expects a meaningful reference. Continued repetition, however, will more and more foreground the word form to the exclusion of function and meaning, until the word literally "makes no sense". It is not the word that is being repeated, but only one of its aspects: the word form.
What I do find odd is where startups use the CxO titles... Can you really be CEO of a two person startup? Seems a bit ludicrous.
- The person is dealing with business-to-business transactions and their position should indicate that they're able to make decisions for the company.
- They were selected specifically for an executive role, rather than simply being a buddy of one of the guys starting things. At lot of startups are built that way.
I've had companies in other jurisdictions where this isn't the case - UK/Aus tend to use CxO for public companies. Private/limited companies tend to have Managing Directors, General Managers, Presidents, etc.
In the end, both of those are the same thing.
your other thing doesn't really make sense, they were called the founding fathers...which by itself means that there was more than 1.