I met Javi Suarez at my son's second birthday party. Our wives went to the same workout classes in Barcelona. He was building TravelPerk. I was CFO at Typeform. We became friends the way you do in a city full of people building things... slowly, then all at once.
I'd been using TravelPerk as a customer at Typeform and loved the product. When I eventually joined him, TravelPerk was 125 people and early in monetisation. I wasn't joining a startup. I was joining a friend's company. That distinction matters more than I understood at the time.
I'd worked closely with Sancar at Typeform. We were getting a fast education together in a fast-growing company. Years later, after Sancar had moved to HotJar and Javi had left TravelPerk, the two of them started Oliva Health... a mental health platform for workplaces. I joined two years in, when they needed someone who knew how to build just enough structure without killing the thing.
Three people, connected across half a dozen companies over the best part of a decade, each arriving at different moments. That's not how the founding stories usually get told. Usually it's two people in a garage with a whiteboard. The reality was messier, more gradual, and held together by personal trust that predated the business by years.
Here's the thing about building with friends: the fear of conflict is real. You feel it. You feel the pull to soften a conversation because you care about the person across the table. You delay a decision by a week because the relationship feels worth protecting. You say 90% of what you mean and hope the last 10% resolves itself.
But the fear isn't the whole story. Friendship also brings trust, the kind that lets a small team move fast without second-guessing motives. And it brings joy, which I think is wildly underrated as a force in building a company. People do their best work when they actually like being in the room together. The trade-off isn't friendship versus performance. It's accepting that you have to fight, constantly, to keep candor high enough that the occasional softening doesn't compound.
We fought that fight at Oliva. Not perfectly. There were product directions I should have pushed back on harder, sooner. Role clarity that could have been addressed a few months earlier. But the friendship also meant we could sit in a room and say hard things without anyone walking out. We gave each other the benefit of the doubt when things got messy. On balance, the trust and the joy were worth far more than the few things we were slow to name.
When I became CEO, Javi moved to CPO. We also had a head of product. Three people with strong opinions about where things should go. Each brought something different. Each had real strengths. But there was a feeling I couldn't quite name... that we had more product leadership than we had product surface area. No spreadsheet told us "one of you needs to leave." No single conversation made it obvious. Just gut feelings, sitting alongside genuine respect for what each person brought to the table.
The turning point was a whiteboard session. Javi and I were working through what the AI product should actually be, and I realised something I couldn't unlearn: I couldn't be hands-off with product. I couldn't write a memo and have it become a product. I needed to be in it. That session was a great experience for both of us, but it also made the future more visible. As I got closer to product, as a whole new chapter started emerging for the company, I started having honest conversations with Javi about his future.
He was, characteristically, crystal clear. He'd do whatever the company needed, even if that meant stepping away. "I'd rather leave well than stay badly," he told me. He meant it.
We ran an experiment. Javi stepped back completely for a month. He'd only lean in if we specifically asked something of him. We didn't ask. That was the answer. Not a dramatic conversation. Not a falling out. Just a quiet experiment that told us both what we already sensed but neither could have proven.
Nothing ugly. But nor was it a single moment in time. It was a series of honest conversations, spread over months, between people who cared about each other and cared about the company enough to separate those two things.
Sancar stayed. The team stayed. The mission stayed. What changed was the founding team itself, which is the thing every startup blog treats as sacred and immovable. It isn't. It's as subject to evolution as the product, the market, and the strategy.
Javi and I still talk. Not about the company. About our kids, about Barcelona, about the things that connected us before any of this started. That's how you know it was done right.