Post a job ad.

That's it. My ad sounded like a normal job in every way, with a title like "Director of X". A couple of specific notes: 1) the first line said "cofounder" in it somewhere, and 2) it specified "part-time to full-time, heavy on equity compensation" somewhere else.

The result: Lots of inappropriate candidates applied. But also, my 2 job posts resulted in three extremely excellent team members: a equity-only cofounder, a mostly-equity cofounder/early hire, and an amazing advisor. I have been working with these folks for months and they are very solid.

I also recommend my vetting process: just like a job. That is, I did a phone screen, a multi-hour interview, a little take-home, and I winnowed down the candidates at each stage. With the chosen few, I kicked off a "let's do this" conversation. My pitch was, "I know it's ridiculous, but let's get business married, we'll set up an offsite and start working together full-time... and, if we really need to, we'll get an annulment". That's what vesting is for!

Hope that helps :)

The point of my advice is this: there is already a well-understood mechanism to find work associates. It's job ads. I have found, through empirical research, that you can find cofounders there too. You can apply that in your circumstances.

Still I think this is a good idea.... it's a big enough distinction to need a completely different place to post them.

It is also very much in line with Mark Suster's advice on finding a co-founder: Hire him/her.

Source: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/the-co-founder-mythology-791...

Brave on iOS.

Now that I’ve said that, this looks really interesting! Good luck with your work, thank you for sharing your experience about finding cofounders.

I've tried things like cofounderslab, cold messaging through social DMs and working my network but there's such a small cohort of people who (1) find value in working at a startup, (2) are willing to take equity in the beginning without being paid and (3) believe in your idea enough to want to work hard.

I've had to learn how to scale myself into different roles (outside of engineering) to keep going, but it really is an exercise in testing your limits: mentally, physically, emotionally, socially...

I hope this is something that actually works.

edit: Just to give more context, I have had people who I trusted and who initially signed on to help, but they fell out somewhat quickly due to one of the three things I mentioned above. Most people don't understand how much work goes into actually making a startup happen and flame out pretty quickly...alas...

Understandable, this problem has worsened over the past 20 years as an increasing number of new grads just see computers == way to get rich quickly || a good job. Crypto is the worst example of this greed-oriented mindset, at least during the dotCom boom you generally had to come with a unique idea instead of just forking a git repo and rebadging it.

There used to be a greater degree of intrinsic curiosity that drove most engineers & startup culture, but FAANG ideology has really taken over the bulk of the mind-share around what it means to be in tech. Some of this is not bad because it's been easier than ever to find quality brick-layers who view it as "just a job", but your genuine visionaries who are motivated by excitement about tech and great ideas are increasingly lost in the noise.

That said, a FAANG job in tech is a perfectly acceptable career choice. Some internet bubbles like to look down on FAANG jobs or write them off as easy (once you pass the tech interview) but the reality is that they're generally quite challenging and rewarding. Companies aren't throwing huge salaries at people because the jobs are relaxing and the work is easy enough that anyone can do it well. There's nothing wrong with a FAANG job, and being a founder isn't morally superior to other career options.

The real problem is when students get average grades at an average university, then take an average job at an average company, then get disappointed when they're not being paid top-1% FAANG salaries like they read about on HN and /r/cscareerquestions for the 4 years they were in college. Most of the students I work with are realistic, but it's a very difficult situation when someone's expectations don't match reality.

Do you have a few tips where a mid twenty SWE can find these type of people in SF and avoid the people who are mostly in it for the money?

Almost everybody interested in working unpaid on an exciting idea is also the kind of person who has exciting ideas. They'll usually want to spend their savings on one of those ideas, not somebody else's. The times I've signed up to help start somebody else's idea for no cash were because I had a long relationship with the people involved.

My big tip for people wanting to trade self-made lottery tickets for work is to get external confirmation. Investors, customer commitment, traction, or at least a compelling prototype. This post I wrote in 2012 holds up reasonably well: https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-developers-willing-to...

Comparing this succinct but informative post and your Quora post makes that very clear.

Unless both (or all) founders are aligned with the same mission and vision, it will be an emotional rollercoaster that IMO might drag the progress down.

For these reasons I find it more comfortable staying solo founder and dealing with all the aspect of running the business.

That goes for anyone else reading this thread as well, of course.

It's not just the amount of work that dissuades people. It's the overall value proposition.

Usually if you can get someone in the door and they truly believe the company will be successful, they do everything necessary to cling to the company. No one wants to give up a chance to own a piece of a future successful startup. At minimum, they want some of their equity to vest in exchange for the work they've put in to get to this point.

When people believe the company will succeed but don't want to put in the effort, they keep up appearances until their founder vesting cliff. It's unfortunately a common problem for startups to have a zombie cofounder who doesn't want to give up their equity but isn't pulling their way. They want to force the other cofounders to give them their equity as compensation for the (minimal) work they put in.

If cofounders are simply walking away and surrendering equity, it's likely that there are bigger problems than just the amount of work. In these cases, it's likely that the cofounders just didn't believe the company was headed for success.

If I really wanted to go through the excruciating pain and insane work required in a startup I’d rather try to work on my own ideas and not for others.

But I prefer FAANG rest and vest!

I find it difficult to grasp how this is always casually thrown like the majority of people could but choosing not to. What's the thinking behind this? Would not there be lots of people who would love to do this if their basic necessities were somehow met?

I wish there was but like I alluded to, the pool who meet those three criteria isn't big at all. Minus any external funding or being independently wealthy, there's no way to pay potential cofounders and continue to bootstrap the business (they aren't free, have operating expenses).

I can show people I've been working on this forever, have a full product, business plan and am working toward funding but that still does jack-all.

It's unfortunate because I desperately want to pay someone, but it's just not in the cards right now. That's why hopefully the idea itself should help instill some confidence that if we execute, it could become something cool (and profitable).

I get the world doesn't usually work like that though, which is why solutions like this might help me find like-minded people.

I've rarely met someone who wanted to join other's ideas/WIP. Which makes for an interesting dynamics and a very low success rate.

It seems like there are a lot of potential CEOs out there with ideas looking for a CTO to do the heavy lifting -- and the VCs are all over them -- met multiple in last few weeks with nothing more than an idea

As an engineer, with a vast piece of prototype tech funded myself up to this point, and no CEO -- because I don't really want a CEO right now, just some additional R&D funding to clean things up to start that commercialising process -- but VCs don't appear to want to hear that

Ex-meme company founder CEOs good, heavy tech R&D without that bad

You have to wonder how much deep tech is out there looking for home right now -- that can't get an investor audience without complying with the narrow criteria VCs are putting in place -- 90%+ won't even talk to you if you've not been personally referred

And they want to treat them like poorly paid employees (which, often, they are poorly compensated). People see high compensation for FAANG types and think engineers are respected. Let me tell you, having been in management, nothing is further from the truth. ICs are still ICs, a lower social class, and thought of as such. Any “respect” is simply a temporary condition of the labor market: they’re placated and their egos tolerated until something less expensive comes along.

I think it's more of a case of CEOs not taking no for an answer for mission critical funding. I've been on the chain for many VC connections, and in the room for maybe twenty pitches. In almost all cases a slightly neuroatypical CEO has carpet bombed sources of funding with genuine letters requesting meetings. The process often takes 6-8 months from initial contact to follow-ups, to actually getting a reply, to setting an in-person meeting, then discussing next-steps, referrals, etc.

VCs aren't an API; they're VERY busy people. Make sure they know you're committed.

Pretty much. If you can't make the deck yourself, hire a third party to mock one up for you after you've put the content together; let them do the spacing, font, background, design work. Then the emails are on you; set a timer for follow-ups, make a spreadsheet regarding appointments.

You're still a builder, but you're gonna be building human connections for a bit. If you reframe things in that way, it's less jarring.

A fund that just backs raw R&D ... with no referrals or exit history ... only evals the tech on merit

The few pure R&D funds that do that, to my knowledge, are restricted to university spin-outs right now

As things stand today -- the individuals (I know) most capabable of building awesome engineering are the least likely to get through the current VC obstacle courses -- who are all looking for the same needle in the same haystack

Define 'merit'.

From the perspective of an investor, merit is commercial potential. Small traction in a large market shows commercial potential.

'Raw R&D' without commercial potential is definitely the domain of universities, not VCs.

(I'm a VC)

However, having spent time with funds now -- it feels like those two criteria (market/team) are defined with heavy bias to what exists today

So building some radically new tech -- that is not directly comparable to unicorn X or Y who vaguely exist in a similar space -- will fail at first funding hurdle unless you move that R&D work closer to what X or Y are doing -- to the point you're just building a clone of something successful today

This potentially eliminates a lot of tech that is innovative -- try showing a VC some tech that is not SaaS right now as what you're trying to achieve doesn't lend itself to that model

Same on the team front -- VCs appear to expect a founding team to be defined as B, C, D and any team that does not fit those boxes must be missing some critical skills -- leading to pressure on founders to fill gaps at start that they don't think are gaps -- just to jump through some artificial hoop set by the VCs who only seem to want to put pegs into predefined holes

That said, I believe your core point. My guess is the person you are responding to is missing vital core skills or otherwise has an uninvestable company. It might be fixable (hopefully) or not.

The idea that being too busy with product or customers to jump the hurdles they set could be a bad thing for funding doesn't reflect well on VCs (I'm the first person to argue the importance of knowing how to hunt for business is often underrated by engineers, but not every business needs networking oriented business developer types, and those that do are still better if they can dedicate more time hunting for intros to customers and less hunting for intros to investors)

Steering people early in their careers into underpaid overworked founder positions at poorly led companies can sometimes be hugely destructive.

To the people at YC leading this initiative - have you ever matched a CEO with zero management experience to a newer engineer, and have you ever matched a CTO with zero professional engineering experience to a newer CEO?

I've been burnt a few times by bad CEOs/co-founders. Where I did my part (to build out the product) but they screwed up theirs.

Next time a non-technical founder pitches me to come on board and do all the actual work then I'll be requiring the a majority stake.

Looking forward to CEO-as-a-service or as part of an investment deal. At the end of the day, CTO-as-a-service does exist and technical work does get outsourced to dev shops using investor money, why not outsource/delegate the remaining non-technical founder work?

CEOs may only have an "idea" but perhaps theyve demonstrated a strong PMF.

Talked to maybe 20-30 people through the platform.

Joined one startup as cofounder. Worked together for two months, then left. My cofounder was smart, had high EQ, and I enjoyed working with them, but we had different visions and parted amicably.

My thoughts:

- Early on, there was a smaller pool of people, but they were of higher quality. I feel the quality of people has diminished over time. YMMV.

- It was interesting just to have talks with the high quality people and expand my network. This kinda segued me into Lunchclub, but I've since stopped both. Depending on who you are, you might get burnt out with these "social" calls after a while.

- As a technical person, I had a lot of business-y people reach out, most of which I didn't end up responding to. There's plenty of candidates, just like dating on Tinder. I get to choose to work with the really nice and productive people that I like.

- BIGGEST PROBLEM: Unfortunately, it suffers the same problem as every other cofounder matching program. There's no system or formula to really dig deep and see if you're compatible on all the levels you need to be. This means it can be a big time and energy drain, from the initial meets, to the dating process, to even cofounder work.

If you do use this, some tips:

- Being short and sweet with your profile. Burying the fact that you're a high school student in 5 paragraphs of text won't make it more likely for me to work with you, and I probably won't even read it.

- Add a photo. You're going to be working with a human, not a robot.

- Your cofounder courting process is something you'll have to develop and figure out what you're looking for. Take your time and think about it.

That said - it might be worth it for young-ish people to also not think of a startup as something 'precious' and that you don't need to get along super deeply with the others.

It's not your baby, it's just a project.

Comedy and script writers talk about this - they encourage getting past the point of working out every little detail towards just 'writing'. Work on stuff that works and that other participants (aka investors) want to work on and where there is momentum.

Certain minimums - yes. Probably shared vision. At the same time, no plan lasts contact with the enemy/market so the saying goes and it's almost as though the team needs to be able to ride storms.

If we think of ourselves as professionals first and not makers/artists first ... there might be more room to get along. Focus on the market, customers, product, outcomes, get along and that's it.

Edit:

Assuming have a room full of actually talented, creative conscientious people who have the EI/maturity to 'get along well' - shouldn't partnering up be one of the easier things to do?

From a certain perspective it's kind of ridiculous that it's so hard for people to 'match' (assuming again high levels of talent, conscientiousness, EI, professionalism).

The primary issue I'm going to guess is willingness to work on a specific project wherein someone already has some vision - but one could argue this is a sign of missing professionalism on the part of all parties. Not only can visions be adjusted, but founders might want to recognize that if their vision isn't going to get traction that it might be worth dropping the concept entirely and focusing instead on the other participant. And irrespective of the other parties willingness to buy into a specific vision, they're definitely going to have a lot of their own inputs given their backgrounds and it's probably worth being malleable at very least.

Marc Andreesen is famous for saying 'it's not about passion it's about what you're good at' and that's fundamentally a measure of mature professional disposition. Of course you can't work on something you really don't want to ... but otherwise the ambition should invariably be derived from the opportunity, people, markets - so many factors many of which aren't related to 'the thing'.

If it's a bunch of musicians at the 'Rock School Academy' I can see it being hard to form groups, but I wonder if a group of professionals should be able to link up in a better way, especially with some guidance and 3rd party / objective mentors helping to create critical masses.

The co-founder search is difficult if you have nothing interesting to say and if you aren't prepared to make the jump.

After my personal journey for 2 startups, (both venture backed and non-venture backed), I find it's important to: 1. have at least 2 years of personal savings ready 2. know what things you're exceptional at doing and what things you really suck at 3. be ready to bare all in terms of personal/biz life goals and transparency with your co-founder 4. proactively go to places where you and your co-founder would both enjoy doing (hackathons, startup events, conferences, online forums about startups, etc.) 5. have a "trial" period, where you make things together or work on the startup together with set milestones in mind 6. be ready to challenge a co-founder's ideas, be weary of people who agree with you 100% of the time 7. Not everyone has to be the "visionary" founder, some people are looking to join an existing idea and that's equally as important

Also, we talk a lot about how it's hard to assess the quality of technical co-founders, but it's also really hard to assess the quality of non-technical co-founders. I'd love to collaborate with a non-technical person, but I have no way to determine whether a person is good at the skills which I lack. Maybe it's my tech chauvinism showing but there seems to be a lot of non-technical people who want esssentially a get-rich-quick scheme.

Real, ridiculous charisma (like can totally work a room, will impress almost anyone they sit down with), very aggressive on the commercial side, down-to-earth judgment/understands things/easy to be on same page.

Might have viewed being insanely charismatic as a red flag but I saw first hand how easy it was to get meetings, create business and client relationships, and have employees basically loving the guy.

So a good test is: does this non technical cofounder simply blow me away as a person and in their manners.

Ideas are cheap and most suck (that is, not innovative enough to really be something special). I want someone highly skilled at the process of taking something small and good, getting people to invest, and making it bigger. I can build <whatever startup> faster and cheaper and more solid than you could ever imagine, but don't have any desire in schmoozing or learning the VC game.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27748680

Maybe it could link to YC’s founder search thing too?

My karma on this account is related to this account only. I’ve thought about asking to gather my old karma onto this one, but I’m not sure I care.

This is a rather interesting shift, since in the past YC themselves advocated against co-founding with someone you don't know well.

I'd bet money that the bigger factor here is going to be the fact that there are a lot of "big if true" ideas, where the current difficulty of implementing them prevents them from getting implemented, because it's hard to go out and raise money for something when no one has strong conviction that it's possible to build or that there will be market demand. But once they get sufficiently easy to build, then suddenly it becomes rational to go out and try them.

Whereas currently, I have lots of ideas that would yield fuck you money if they worked, but it's too disruptive to have to clear my calendar for six months to go out and execute on any one of them.

The challenges I've seen have mostly to do with the motivations of the cofounders and the process that everyone (including myself) tends to follow in the beginning.

I wrote about my experiences here: https://johnchildseddy.medium.com/why-a-day-zero-start-is-im...

It’d be interesting to see the long term effect of Covid on startup culture, in particular founding of startups and subsequently success rate of startups founded by remote-only cofounders which may have never met in person.

I see a technical question ask. May it be worthwhile to also ask specifically if someone's UX/UI designer or other design experience?

We actually do ask about whether you're interested in working on design, or interested in finding a designer as part of the matching profile. It's in the "Which areas of a startup are you willing to take responsibility for?" section.

For example, I've been spending the last 6 months learning as much as I can about business around an idea I've had. That's involved creating marketing materials, building surveys and gathering user feedback, putting together TOS & privacy policy, attending small business courses to learn accounting basics, learning figma and spending hours watching YT videos or perusing dribbble to come up with inspiration for my own design, and since I'm an engineer by profession - building the thing so I can run the progress by some of the survey/feedback group.

Obviously I'm still a beginner, so I'm just curious if anyone would mind answer a noob :D

There is a lot there on those two links.

https://www.startupschool.org/posts/35214

I am technical and I am looking for another _technical_ co-founder. Is this pairing unusual? The most talked about pairing seems to be non-technical and technical.

Can you look into it?

I'm not sure if I'm constitutionally built for running a startup but given that I've worked at a few and have lived through the craziness without much of the upside, perhaps I am.

I had a less positive experience with the cofounder matching platform. I am trying to be as objective as possible here, the odds of matching two “ready” humans to work in harmony on an extremely difficult project are extremely low. The numbers are brutally honest here with 4500 matches and only two startups (.0004%) enrolling for the YC Core batch. Yes, that’s three zeros. So many fishes but so few working matches. My biggest grip against the platform was that barely anybody respect the hard requirements. I had very few but one was very important to me, the other co-founder had to be also technical. I received a flood of non-technical cofounder asking for a match. I felt pretty bad about leaving these folks unanswered, so I put the time to create a generic and respectful email to explain why I am set to match with a technical cofounder only.

It’s also mind blowing how many co-founders are already set on their ideas already. I consider myself quite flexible by bringing 5 potential ideas I would like to work on. I think I am also flexible in a way that I am also open to work on somebody else idea, as long as I would want it for myself. I matched with so many future cofounders that were already in a mindset that their project was the thing that they could not see themselves not working on it. I might be wrong but from my experience their progress as a company was almost nil (landing page with no clients). While most of the ideas weren’t ground breaking. So, prepare yourself to spend a lot of time on figuring out if something has any potential or not. It’s a bit hard on the morale to decline so many humans. I gave my 100% to do it as well as I could. Oh, and I won’t go too deep either into that subject but a lot of co-founders are in for either the fame or the money, not really my style either. Money is required down the line but it shouldn’t be the main target. Once again, prepare yourself to decline a lot of people if your profile attracts a lot of attention but it doesn’t match what you are looking for.

All in all, kudos to the team at YC. What they are doing is extremely hard and they did a great job. The complains about matchmaking being extremely hard is similar to stating that water is wet.

Oh and funky observation. When an organization like YC is building their own social network from scratch, it shows that in 2021 there is still no trustable social network platform to build upon.

For example, a company usually has a mission. At the same time, up to a point a CEO has a duty to his/her employees' well being. In a crisis, these may be in conflict. And in a crisis it can be very hard to tell if a decision cutting one way or the other is stemming from expediency, a conflict of interest, on-the-job evolution of a person's values, or an underlying consistent principled view that is now manifesting in action. (The last of which is what one would arguably point at as the person demonstrating integrity.)

How does the math work out there?

In practice though, I do believe that if you work with someone for several months on a serious trial project you should be able to build a fair amount of confidence in the relationship's potential. I'd definitely still recommend talking through what a co-founder breakup would look like and signing documents that include a vesting cliff before actually starting something real together though. (That advice applies no matter how you met your co-founder.)

Edit: I actually think this is the right move. One hast to find people outside one's immediate network. Otherwise there would only be very few founders.

That's at least a pleasingly symmetrical strawman - equally distorted at both ends!

Given that multi-founder teams still represent 90% of the startups they fund, I could understand calling this a moderate shift. But "flipped on its head" feels like an exaggeration.

Clearly it was hyperbolic, but I think satya71 was drawing attention to some legitimate mixed messaging on the part of YC over the years.

I certainly had a similar (perhaps cynical/incorrect/unfair) reaction to this announcement.

Maybe that's not the reality, but the perception is something to consider, too.

Is it really a contradiction or a natural evolution? I don't know. I think it's fine to raise the question - Kyle and I were chatting about it beforehand too.

Trouble finding conspirators is a definite bottleneck to scaling!

I don’t know why I had to “apply” to offer to be a technical cofounder.

After all this they “rejected” me. How can you be rejected from offering to be a technical cofounder?

What a waste of time.

I don’t recommend startup school as a way to find a cofounder especially if you’re technical.

I don’t want to share all my details, I want to see who’s looking for a technical cofounder then I’ll apply with my details.