Office Hours with Mark Stiles from Joze.ai
Agreement Before Fracture
How founders spot early co-founder conflict and build agreements that actually stick
Most co-founder breakups don't start with a blowup. They start with small mismatches in expectations about roles, equity and who decides what, which go unspoken until they're expensive to fix. By then, the conversation that would have taken an hour can take months, or end the company.
Join us for Office Hours with Mark Stiles, co-founder of Joze.ai and a former attorney with 30 years of experience in pre-litigation negotiation, conflict resolution and founder agreements.
💡 What We'll Cover:
Spotting the early signs: The warning signs of co-founder conflict before they become deal-breakers.
The hard conversation: How to raise it while trust is still intact.
Productive conflict: Why some conflict is healthy, and how to tell it apart from the kind that breaks teams.
What belongs in a real founder agreement: Equity, roles, decision rights, vesting and exits.
From vague alignment to a working agreement: Turning good intentions into something both sides will actually use.
Live Q&A: Bring one concrete co-founder or team-tension problem and leave with a next step.
👤 About the Host:
Mark Stiles is co-founder of Joze.ai and a former attorney with 30 years of experience in pre-litigation negotiation, conflict resolution and founder agreements. After decades helping individuals, families and businesses navigate disputes, he left traditional practice to help others avoid the cost and pain of litigation by building an AI platform designed to make agreements accessible at scale. Through Joze.ai he focuses on helping founding teams align before fractures happen and turn hard conversations into structured paths to agreement. He is also a podcaster and mentor passionate about reducing the emotional and financial cost of conflict.
🎟️ Who this is for: Founders with a co-founder or about to bring one on, and anyone working through tension on an early team.
Come with one problem you're stuck on. The more specific, the more useful the session.