The conventional wisdom about working with friends is wrong. In many cases, friends are the absolute best people to work or start a company with.

I’ve started several businesses with good friends: Hubble Contacts + Agora with Jesse Horwitz (friends for 5 years before working together), Willow with William Herlands (9 years), and BZR with John Shi (7 years). Also, our first two hires at Hubble were some of my and Jesse’s closest friends.

Some of these businesses have gone better than others but in all cases I’m really glad I chose to work with these guys. They remain among my best friends today.

Why are friends great people to work with? Several reasons:

  1. Even if you’ve never worked with a friend, if you’ve known them for long enough you probably have a good sense of their strengths, weaknesses, interests and can usually extrapolate those into a business context. In other words, you almost certainly have a much better sense of what working with a friend you’ve known for years will be like than someone you can just interview a few times. In this sense, working with a friend is way lower risk.

  2. Working closely with someone especially on a new venture requires a lot of trust. Friends have a reservoir of trust and shared history you can draw on when you’re making pivotal decisions together.

  3. Work, especially startups, is often really hard. And you’re sometimes spending more time with people at work than your partner or family. Being around people you actually like is critical to getting through the bad times and makes the good times better and more fun. And you’re much more likely to enjoy being around someone a lot if … you’ve previously enjoyed being around them as friends.

Why are people usually against working with friends? Understandably, they’re worried they can damage their friendship if the business doesn’t go well (or if it goes really well). Or they’re concerned they won’t be able to separate their work life from their out-of-work life.

These concerns are overblown. Your actual good friends should remain your friend through trying situations–business or otherwise. Even when things have been at their worst, business tensions haven’t come even close to hurting my friendships. If anything, some adversity can bring you closer.

And I wouldn’t be too concerned about building a Chinese Wall between your work and friend life. You hopefully still have friends outside of your business partnerships and I, for one, enjoy spending time with friends in basically all contexts.

Next time you’re starting a business or hiring someone, give your friends a shot. Now family on the other hand…