- spoke to 50 potential cofounders (not 2-3 like before)
- 50% of my pipeline were founders with underrepresented backgrounds
- after first 10 had a profile that I was looking for (PM in consumer or devtools)
- had a 40 part questionnaire that potential cofounders filled in, took about 90 mins, sent them my answers after I got theirs
- prioritize chemistry and company value alignment (eg questions like when do you want to sell the company)
- worked together on small company-building projects for a few weeks to assess fit
- went to cofounder therapy (still going, it's been two years)
- getting 50 is hard, I asked for recommendations from friends, colleagues, investors, posted on social media and linkedin, used angellist, went to meetups, cold emailed people, cold linkedin messaged. All produced good leads and lots of bad leads
+1 to everything Paul said, especially cofounder therapy.
The other thing that really helped me was understanding what I wanted from a cofounder (philosophically, skills-wise, ideology) before I was making a this person-or-not decision. Feels less personal.
I got that knowledge by doing many hackathon/intense sprints with other people to figure out when people tended to not work for me: https://blog.ellenchisa.com/startup-lockdown-day-0-576d2d7d4.... I also had a good sense of traits that others found annoying (esp when they quit other jobs) that I felt fine with.
Other useful things:
- Explicitly naming "red flags" and things we were worried about.
- Calling Paul's previous cofounder (who graciously agreed to talk to me).
As a random thing I still find interest, I said no when someone tried to warm intro me to Paul, but agreed to meet when he sent me a cold email. Felt more sincere somehow.
This absolutely deserves a long blog post on its own. You and Ellen should consider writing it. Many founders (including my past self) would have wildly benefited from something like this.
If you register now for Startup School 2019, you can now start using the directory to find other single founders looking for a cofounder. Filter by proximity, vertical and company description. This is a really great free resource to help you do the single best thing to help your startup.
Over 11K founders have already signed up for Startup School. Classes start July 22nd. https://startupschool.org
I'm with pg on this, starting a company with someone is a bigger commitment than getting married and without the physical chemistry to help things through tough spots. You'd be crazy to do that with someone you just met. I can't help thinking you'd actually be decreasing your odds of success versus just being a single founder. I'll stay a single founder and I feel that's the right decision for me. I can weather the highs and lows. I remain curious to see if the data will back this up more generally.
Long term this could be a good idea to meet people with similar interests, but to partner with for your next startup maybe. Not for now.
> starting a company with someone is a bigger commitment than getting married
How? You can leave a company you founded at any any time without any financial repercussions usually but marriages you cannot unless you get a prenup (which probably costs legal fees) and that's not even including the ring nor wedding.
>>>> starting a company with someone is a bigger commitment than getting married
>> How? You can leave a company you founded at any any time without any financial repercussions
Absolutely not! Leaving a company has huge financial repercussions! If you have no agreement, you are either killing the company (as everyone disbands) or end up with either no ownership or end up with some uncertain amount of ownership as all the owners fight amongst themselves. If you do have a vesting agreement, you've usually lost everything if you haven't reached your 1st year cliff vest.
Either way -- you've lost a lot --
0. You've "lost" all the work you put in (often at zero or low salary). You often put in 80hr workweeks -- at that rate you could have made a boatload of money with a real job or contracting, and instead you put it all in as sweat equity and now the company owns all that unpaid effort, not you.
1. You've lost all the money you may have invested into the company
2. You've lost all the IP you came up with but may now be owned by the company
Also, I'd be worried if the startup means so little that you are willing to walk away without disappointment -- because startups go through hard times and you have to be willing to slog through the despair without quitting.
This is silly. Most startups funded by these VC types are “go big or go home” and “fail fast” types. All this stuff you said about the company failing is an what the VC pushes you to do 9 out of 10 times and move on. The money lost came from various sources including investors who take risks for a living.
How do you say that is worse than kids growing up in a broken home and many lives affected? An entrepeneur can have 5 failures and 8 successful exits. Do you want to say the institution of marriage can be like that?
>You can leave a company you founded at any any time without any financial repercussions
This mentality is the exact wrong one to have, especially if you're "co-founder dating".
Unless you're two people hacking away in a dorm room with no customers, making no money (hardly a "business"), there are all kinds of obligations and financial repercussions you might have.
and when you have children, then a permanent separation is impossible unless one partner gives up seeing the children ever again. you are connected for the rest of your lives
Getting married to someone you just met on a dating app would probably be a bad idea. It could still work. Arranged marriages aren't much different.
Aside from that, there's no issue using a dating app to find that special someone you should marry. Same goes for founder dating. You have to start somewhere.
In any case you should try working with your potential cofounder first. A friend isn't necessarily a good cofounder.
There are always exceptions. It still makes it a bad idea.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with using it to meet like minded people who you might collaborate with one day.
But let's not ignore the fact that single founders can be successful too, and one of the biggest causes of startup failure is co-founder disputes, according to YC's own data. The real question is, will it help more than it hurts? The good news is we may know in a few years with this experiment YC is running.
Agreed that the biggest cause of failure is issues between founders.
One could say then that you should only start a company when you have a cofounder, and one that is good. But in reality there's no way of knowing who will be good.
The best proxy is choosing someone you have worked with before. A coworker for instance.
Simply choosing a founder because you hang out with them is not a good idea.
Try moonlighting with your founder dating buddy before making the leap.
>Entrepreneurs Are Better Off Going It Alone, Study Says
Startups founded by a single person are more likely to survive and succeed than those founded by a team (wsj article on paper by Jason Greenberg)
It's unclear they are remarkably more rare than other types. The data appears to show that single founders are the second most successful arrangement after pairs.
Second most doesn't mean anything when you're talking about three arrangements, realistically.
I would like it to be true that solo founders have just as much chance of success. I have been unable to find a cofounder for years, and I am not biased against solo companies. People are unpredictable, and even wildly successful companies have some disheartening back stories. I've learned that from books like Idea Man (Microsoft) and Masters of Doom (id Software) where founding members got screwed by morally challenged cofounders. In the case of id, Tom Hall received nothing from id in the end, and forfeited all of his equity when he was fired. Because they decided he wasn't needed anymore, despite him being there from the beginning through the tough times.
But it stands to reason that you are better off if you can find someone who is honest and is going to work hard with you, simply because two heads are better than one. When used together at least. Emphasis on honest, I would rank trust and ethics over experience and intelligence.
If you can't find that person, and you are determined, then may as well go ahead and go it alone. You only live once. Just realize the odds are stacked even higher against you. You are only lying to yourself if you refuse to accept that truth.
And you can be a cofounder of a successful company, but still fail miserably and have it all taken away by a bad cofounder.
You just dismissed the data and replaced it with nothing of substance. Forget your feelings and look at the data, single founders are successful especially when you're talking about smaller companies that might not go the VC route. VCs are really only interested in companies that have a shot at being unicorns.
It doesn't tell how many companies with single founders fail vs teams, but it shows that single founder companies comprise about half of successful startups on crunchbase. It's not perfect, but it's hardly bad either.
>It doesn't tell how many companies with single founders fail vs teams
Exactly, that missing information is what makes the data bad. Negative examples are needed to make any meaningful comparison between single vs team. You're missing an entire distribution showing success vs failure. You gave a perfect example of selection bias.
You would make a terrible statistician, or maybe you're highly skilled in the art of How to Lie with Statistics.
Imperfect data is a fact of life. Provided you understand what it represents ("Of startups that succeed, a large proportion have single founders") there is nothing wrong with using this.
It's much better than what you have offered: no data and insults to anyone who disagrees with you. You may want to consider this when thinking about why you have been unable to find a co-founder.
Depends on the scale of success. A successful lifestyle business can be achieved by a solo founder. A unicorn or company with large exit is less likely.
An employee is never going to be as personally invested as a cofounder. But the upside is you can terminate them if your working relationship goes awry.
"Getting married to someone you just met on a dating app would probably be a bad idea"
Nope. It is a great idea.
"According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, the global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6 percent — a significantly low number. Compared to the 55 percent of marriages in the world that are unarranged, this low statistic shows the success rate of arranged marriages"
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but those numbers are extremely misleading. I can tell you from close personal observation that this low divorce rate is almost certainly because divorce is extremely taboo in the kinds of societies that have a lot of arranged marriages. The kind of culture that sees an arranged marriage as OK is also very likely one that judges divorcees harshly. See also: the Hasan Minhaj bit about the "What will people say?" attitude in South Asian cultures.
Also, the super low divorce rate should make you suspicious -- it would be more believable if it was slightly lower (like 30% or whatever), but 6%? There's clearly something else going on, and if you look closely you'll realize why.
On the other hand, arranged marriages tend to take place in very conservative areas with a low tolerance for divorce (legal or social) and tend to be favored by individuals with a low tolerance for divorce (cultural). A more accurate study would perform a cohort analysis of divorce rate across regions as divorce becomes legalized and normalized.
I don't have first hand experience, but my impression is that the best co-founders are those who you've got some history with, who you know and trust. That doesn't happen overnight.
Kind of like an actual dating site might be a good way to meet potential marriage partners, but you'd look at someone pretty weird if you went on a date and they suggested they want to get married right away.
But who knows; those guys see a lot of founders, maybe things work out differently.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. You said "best co-founders are those who you've got some history with, who you know and trust. That doesn't happen overnight"
I agree but then how do you start it in the first place ? Isn't the point of startup school or dating school is to connect people and then from that, over time you can build that history and trust and then use that as consideration whether you want them as your co-founder ?
My theory is that people are looking for people to start a company with ASAP, rather than 4-5 years in the future after they've worked together for a while.
Adding an opposite view, Noam Wassermann in his book "The Founder's Dilemmas"[1] concluded after analysing loads of startups that weak links or acquaintances (friends of friends or persons in the same community) are better co-founders.
Doing business (especially a high-risk, high-stress startup) with friends can lead to the elephant in the room effect when in the long term the founders focus on preserving their relationship thus avoiding the friction.
Side note: the author is a teacher, not a serial entrepreneur where one of Aristotle's quote hold its water: “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
It might not be as ideal as an organic friendship buI wouldn't say it's a bad idea outright. Only a handful of my friends would call themselves entrepreneurial, and those who do are pretty deep in their own domain-specific startups. My criteria for a cofounder match is 50/50 expertise and personality match, but that slides based on how complementary our skill sets are.
Ex: I'm building a new mapping product right now and know very little about image signal processing, but was recently introduced to a CV engineer who blew my mind when we were introduced on LinkedIn. I'm not sure we'd hangout had we not been intro'd, but we get along just fine and her ability to instantly illuminate concepts that had been taking me weeks to grasp is exactly what I need in an early-stage startup cofounder. I think the timing risk of waiting for the "right one" is much greater than finding someone who might not check all of the boxes but meets 90% of what you're looking for. As always, YMMV.
This is more of an opinion, I'm sure there are plenty of cases where the founders didn't know each other directly but were introduced due to common interests and it worked out just fine (My current company included). Yea, you probably shouldn't jump right into it, but I don't think it is a bad idea. Also - if you're sticking to your current network, I imagine the chances of finding someone who has more complementary skills is lower (ie: I'm an engineer & most of my network is engineers, what I'd really need though is more of a business/sales guy)
DnD and similar games are a great way to get to know someones character. how they act in a game shows how they might act in business. (a game with higher stakes)
Right, so the terminology is not accurate because you're not technically dating your cofounder, but... you still have to start "dating" someone to become cofounders eventually.
Dating sounds like a great idea, but I find it difficult to imagine getting to know someone in a small amount of time.
I know people who have married after 3 months of knowing each other and it works, and I imagine the same can happen for founders -- but -- who wants to take that chance? The ideal "marriage" whether in relationships or business settings (IMHO) is one where you observe the person before you are tied to them (e.g., before they are on their best behavior due to courtship), and ideally for a longer period of time so you can see how they are in stressed situations.
Everyone is usually on their best behavior during dating, so you don't know how people react under real pressure (e.g., when millions of dollars of theoretical paper equity are on the line on some crucial decision, or when interests diverge.)
Sure, so it means you should be "dating" for a longer time before you start a company with someone. I'm just not sure I understand the point that's being made here, because it sounds like it's impossible to meet your future cofounder unless you've already done something with them, which is a pretty obvious catch 22.
I cant speak to the GP comment, and I understand the catch 22, however IMHO your history need not be long with them, but I think it is very important that the history is on where you've seen their honesty+integrity+ethic under strained conditions, ideally where they dont know they are being directly evaluated.
Imagine your founder and you are sitting on a train and a lady gets off the train leaving behind a huge gold pendant. If you are both together, perhaps he may virtual signal by calling out to the lady. Wow, what a fine gentlemen and citizen.
Now imagine he is alone, you're far off in the corner of the train watching him, it is dark, and he doesn't realize he's being watched -- do you think he might keep the pendant or would he still act the same way?
Then realize that gold pendants arent found every day, so really you're waiting to see how the person performs when they have hard unselfish decisions to make -- the longer you observe people under independent circumstances that more such events you find and then hopefully you can gauge the person's honesty+integrity+ethic.
Of course it's catch-22. There's a reason that being the right person (or people) at the right time/place is hugely beneficial. We can mitigate somewhat but at the end of the day, luck is a big part.
when getting a client, i always like to start off with a smaller project before jumping into something big. same would goes for a co-founder. lets start a loose cooperation, without long-term commitment. let's see how it goes. make that commitment after the initial project(s) have gone well.
Just like “Who is hiring” thread, a “Looking for co-founder” thread every quarter or 6 months might be helpful to the community? That can help start the conversation which is the first step towards finding the right co-founder. You can also get a good idea about a person by looking at their submission/comment history on HN.
Someone posted one of these recently. I am looking for a cofounder and don’t find one but still found the thread interesting. I think it would be good for the community.
I need someone really awesome in product + growth OR an amazing React + frontend developer.
We've made GREAT progress so far..
Here's the rough elevator pitch.
Polar is a tool for managing knowledge which is kind of a hybrid of Kindle, Github, and Slack. Polar allows you to keep all your knowledge and reading material in one place. You can easily suspend and resume reading complex technical material and annotate and take notes directly without ever having to leave your reading platform.
More specifically, Polar implements spaced repetition, is a technique from cognitive science to prevent the user from forgetting the material they've read. This same technology is used in other platforms like Duolingo but we apply it to other areas outside of just language learning.
... and here's what I'm struggling with at the moment.
1. The long term vision is large but I have to do a better job of explaining the short term vision.
2. I need to do a much better job of conveying the 'aha' moment to our users who visit the site.
3. Marketing right now can definitely be improved. Huge opportunity there.
I've nailed a LOT but of course everyone has limited talents and time. The areas where Polar shines:
- our users that 'get it' LOVE Polar.
- we have a lot of users that STILL love Polar but are waiting to come on board due to one or two smaller missing but critical features. Like Firefox support or mobile or something along these lines. They users LOVE the app once they get the aha moment.
Polar sounds interesting. I've got experience in helping the tech-focused sell their visions, so I might be able to help.
Despite that I'm probably not co-founder material. I'm heading back to Uni in September to study comp sci. But I'm interested in finding impactful side projects.
If you're interested in a chat email me: jpk@zealous.digital
I browsed through the hundred or so other Startup School companies in my vertical and there’s nothing even close to my vision of the future (using computer-vision to add a software layer to real world objects; proof of concept: https://twitter.com/braddwyer/status/910030265006923776).
It’s pretty frustrating actually; it seems obvious to me that it will be the future of human-computer interaction.
I have been waiting for someone to build it for the past 18 months... but nobody seems to be working on it. I finally said “screw it” and I’m going to build it out myself.
If this sounds interesting feel free to reach out! I’m one of the ones looking for a cofounder. (Twitter is easiest. My dms are open)
Maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places but I’ve downloaded most of the AR apps and games that have come out for iOS thus far and they’re almost all gimmicky.
Simply plopping a 3D model into the room isn’t particularly compelling or useful. But that seems to be the bar for “AR apps” today.
Most AR apps today are based on the same toolboxes, either opencv, arkit or arcore. The latter 2 are actually pretty good (in terms of tracking and plane detection) for more simple use cases.
So by gimmicky I assume you’re talking specifically about the use case?
If so it’s probably true that majority of ar apps are games that don’t work too well or ar just demos/prototypes.
However there are a few that are pretty functional e.g. the measuring app in iOS. Was your idea to consolidate all such use cases to create a general purpose app?
The magic comes when combining AR with an app that understands what it’s looking at and how to contextually interact with it.
The AR toolkits tell you about the 3D environment but they don’t do anything to tell you about the context.
When your app understands what it’s looking at it can add relevant functionality (eg solve a paper Sudoku puzzle, give hints, check your work, scan into a playable app, etc).
Generalized scene understanding is still a hard problem in both academia and industry. The big companies are working on such things with access to tons of data.
Assuming you do know what’s in the scene semantically most ar applications that aren’t games do intend to use that information. I’d say the primary hurdle there is still general scene understanding.
It’s easy to identify a sudoku puzzle but not so easy to identify and classify all 3D objects with any sense of precision yet. Seems like a large scale data play to me..
Definitely. Not everything I’d like to do is possible at the moment but Machine Learning is getting better so fast that more and more will become feasible bit by bit.
I have a bunch of ideas that seem like low hanging fruit, a bunch that seem hard but possible, and a lot that will be possible someday. And hopefully I can help accelerate that timeline.
You’re idea is to build that context layer? It seems the apps you’re talking about will become reality when we have useful AR glasses. But they will be manually built for each usecase.
Essentially. I have a list of use cases I think are possible to tackle now so I’m going to work on building out more single-niche apps in the near term.
In doing so I’ll have to build out tools and common code which I hope to eventually release as a platform to help other devs expand the idea out into other verticals.
So, the part I don't get is how you need to have already started working on your startup to get access to the directory. Like, if you find a co-founder on it, won't one or both of the founders have to shut down their start up to work together?
The answer, as with all things in starting a business, is that you have to make wise decisions that yield good results. Seriously.
If you choose a great co-founder with complementary skills and personality, it will drive you forward. If you choose poorly, you would have been better off staying single. The only thing that is really going to matter is your specific results. There is no reason for there to be a general rule that applies to everyone.
Single founder success stories are the minority. Despite the leading cause of startups failing being founder breakup, the greater chance of winning still lies with having one (or two) cofounders.
As someone with two acquisitions under their belt (now technically three since IBM acquired Red Hat, though I wasn't part of that deal in any significant capacity) I can say that the next time I look for a cofounder, I'm going straight to the YC Startup School directory.
Nothing like a cofounder with no real world experience, YC level entitlement, and a history of running/failing out of an overcapitalized tech-startup.
A little bit off topic and a bit pessimistic, but I have just started a new company and I am surprised how high the rates are for services related to job postings/cofounders. Linkedin, angellist etc. If you don't watch out you can easily spend 50k on zero result. Unfortunately not all startups are backed by 5m. Wonder how much this service costs.
I've never had this issue before but why not either
1) act as recruiter yourself. Yeah, some activist investors will tell you to only focus on core business stuff/creating product market fit but that's just certain people's opinion. Presumably you have some kind of network you can leverage + you can cold message people earnestly
2) Contract with a recruiting agency to perform some of the administrative/vetting part and give you the candidate for 1-2 interviews. You only pay for each hire. Expensive (I've heard of rates in the 10-30k range) but definitely does not cost $50k for zero result. This has the added benefit of allowing you to bundle recruiting tasks that you yourself probably don't have time for like background checks
Are there many young hungry lawyers who go to startup school? I have always felt if I could hook up with a good lawyer who liked dealing with the bureaucratic stuff the sky would be the limit.
The Field I am currently working in is "medical devices", but I have a very wide range of interests from agricultural to grinding and cutting tools, Ceramics, etc. Obviously you really don't need a lawyer on full time, but someone with that bent could be taking care of all the paper stuff which I can comprehend, but all too often put off.
Hee, that might be even better. Although that raised the question of why they are still hungry. Perhaps I stated the original question incorrectly. Hmmm.
This is a _profoundly_ bad idea. Cofounders should have a strong personal relationship before they start a company. They need to actually _know_ and _trust_ each other. I'd rather start a company without a co-founder than bring in someone I don't know as an even remotely equal partner.
Most people are in Startup School haven't even started or have no idea. SUS is a perfect place to start on a small project with other people. From our experience at YC, getting a cofounder is the single best thing to improve the odds of your startup.
That could be at the same time true on average and not true for the specific case where the founders don't know each other all that well (and therefore don't trust each other much more than you'd trust a stranger). If you have stats on the latter case, I'd be curious to see them. If not, consider collecting the stats from this experiment.
Maybe people are "good by default" and all that, but I do have some very early stage startup experience (VPEng), and both the founders and the employees have enough trouble trying to not get screwed even without such additional complications. Money and egos always find a way to ruin everything.
I'm a senior developer. I'm up to quit my job and start something for anyone who's looking for a technical cofounder. Specifically though I prefer people who compliment what I lack in areas of salesmanship and social engineering.
I'm a passionate born entrepreneur with a powerful story and a weirdly extended network. I'm a warrior, a recruiter, and I believe in violence of action.
Are your a chess player with a taste for risk? I'm interested in creating the company of the future, heavy on processes and UX. Let's mix empathy and Sun Tzu's the Art of War to create a global conglomerate?
Quick summary:
- based on 3 failed cofounder relationships, 1 successful company (CircleCI)
- current cofounding (https://darklang.com) very strong
- spoke to 50 potential cofounders (not 2-3 like before)
- 50% of my pipeline were founders with underrepresented backgrounds
- after first 10 had a profile that I was looking for (PM in consumer or devtools)
- had a 40 part questionnaire that potential cofounders filled in, took about 90 mins, sent them my answers after I got theirs
- prioritize chemistry and company value alignment (eg questions like when do you want to sell the company)
- worked together on small company-building projects for a few weeks to assess fit
- went to cofounder therapy (still going, it's been two years)
- getting 50 is hard, I asked for recommendations from friends, colleagues, investors, posted on social media and linkedin, used angellist, went to meetups, cold emailed people, cold linkedin messaged. All produced good leads and lots of bad leads