Ask HN: How to find co-founders

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096461

by valarauca1 • 12 years ago

64 42 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The question is simple. I found a problem I really want to solve, there's a pretty big market for the solution (data collation and storage of automotive test data).

Except I'm purely a software guy, and I'll openly admit I know nothing about developing a business, networking, or money. So I'll likely need a team.

How do you find one?

shekhar101• 12 years ago

IMHO, the best way to find like minded co-founders is to actively attend meetups, hackathons, conferences and related events. You will be surprised how often you will find passionate people who are very much willing to work and join forces with people like you.

valarauca16• 12 years ago

I have actually signed up for several in my area while making this post.

mhhughes8• 12 years ago

We agree that offline methods are very important to the co-founder search too. In addition to an online matching platform at CoFoundersLab.com, CoFoundersLab holds quarterly Matchups events in many cities (via Meetup) to facilitate some of the "in-person dating" for founders: http://www.cofounderslab.com/entrepreneurs-meetup-networking

Seb86• 12 years ago

Good question, has anyone tried Cofounderslab.com or similar services ?

valarauca16• 12 years ago

Made a profile on the former.

macguyver• 12 years ago

Collabfinder is another service to find collaborators.

I tried Cofounderslab.com, Collabfinder and did not find the quality people I was looking for.

Perhaps not surprisingly, HN yielded a much higher level of potential collaborators/co-founders. I spoke with a few folks on here and am impressed. Most prefer working with someone in person.

Many Universities nowadays have plenty of resources to the prospective Entrepreneur. Check out the local business schools to see if they host open innovation days.

If you are looking for contractors to help, ODesk and Elance surprised me with some pretty high quality people, but you have to sift through a lot of applications.

acremades• 12 years ago

CoFoundersLab had been working on solving the problem of cofounder matchmaking for about four years now. It's a big problem: research suggests that of all startups that fail, about 33% fail primarily due to cofounder related issues!

In this quest, they have brought onboard various experts such as former executives from Match.com, and leading researchers for the Kauffman Foundation. Furthermore, CoFoundersLab has acquired several companies over the years enhancing its IP portfolio, and execution capability.

Through CoFoundersLab, members can search a self-selected pool of cofounder candidates, while getting a much better sense for wether the cofounder candidates posses complementary skills, and have compatible personalities, goals, and values!

There is no "silver bullet" solution, but CoFoundersLab.com is an out of this world better approach to embarking on the journey of cofounder search!

Disclosure: I am the CEO at Onevest and we just announced a merger with CoFoundersLab.

morgante• 12 years ago

Hey, no offense but this comment reads like a press release. It's possibly to share your message/perspective in a forum without using terms like "enhanced its IP portfolio."

tet• 12 years ago

This is like asking how to find a wife. A co-founder should be someone with not only have knowledge in certain domains but someone who have the same passion for your planning startup like you do. Attending to different events could be a good thing but start with the beginning, search your co-founder in your friends. Didn't find anything? Try to meet new people and don't just search them for their " abilities ".

gregpilling• 12 years ago

I am a business guy in automotive for the last 25 years.

What is your product? Who is the buyer?

rwhitman• 12 years ago

Being the software guy gives you a lot of leverage in the situation, especially if you have a lucrative market lined up.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

There's a mental hack I would use in situations like these. Essentially, stop looking for a "cofounder" and start looking for a "collaborator."

Right now you don't have a business, per se. You have a concept. It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't need a cofounder just yet. Turn the concept into a project. Work on any bits and pieces of the project that you can. Go to meetups, bring your idea to a hackathon, and maybe do a Show HN when you've got something tangible. (Something tangible could even be a really interesting blog post about the topic.) All the while, look for collaborators to help out.

The "collaborator" mindset frees you of the mental bottleneck of having to have a cofounder before making progress. It also allows you to work with, and to vet people instead of having a shotgun wedding to the first would-be cofounder you think you get along with.

PG once wrote that a sign of a good team is one that's worked together and knows each other. You can't push a magic button and add five or six years of shared history to any cofounder you meet. But you can get some work experience with collaborators before cofounding a business with one of them. You're looking for someone you can click with over the next five or more years; it's worth a few extra months of scramble in the beginning to find someone great.

valarauca16• 12 years ago

Understood, this route seems the easiest as it lets me get my feet wet slowly.

bbulkow2• 12 years ago

I also use the "turn it into a project" mental hack. Use your engineering mentality to "break it down" and do one step at a time.

Don't shirk the "who can I sell it to for how much" question, though. That's the common fear/concern of technical guys.

meowface• 12 years ago

I suspect the majority of people who see their startups as a "business" before they see them as a "project" tend to fail, or at least not be very successful.

swah2• 12 years ago

Sad to say, but I'll probably go alone when I try to create another business. The first time I tried to start with best friends, they jumped off after a couple months and I hated them for it.

alimoeeny• 12 years ago

Sir, Why did you do that. I am sorry to hear that. As other's have said, finding a co-founder is like finding a wife, you just don't assume your best friend will be a good life partner. and you can ruin your friendship this way.

swah2• 12 years ago

Its been a few years, but I probably believed that we could trust each other and that was pretty important.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

First, your search is different from what it would be in the corporate theater. In the corporate world, you're either looking for mentors who are 5+ years ahead of you (i.e. better than you at what you want to do) or subordinates to offload grunt work (sorry, I mean "delegate") to. With co-founders, you're looking for complements, not people on the same track. It might be hard to swallow your ego and look for someone with a radically different skill set, especially given the non-meritocracy of business co-founder value (which is 90% connections, 10% innate ability). But it's what you need to do.

Rule 1: Code or Contacts. Hire (at the early stage) only if the person brings something in either department that no one else can do. Most "business co-founders" can't bring funding on an idea. You don't need them, if they can't. Business co-founders are naturally going to end up with a lot of power and you can't afford the slot for a guy who can't make it rain with minimal initial effort (save your effort for building) on your part. You need a guy with the contacts to solve the funding problem, so you can focus on building the product.

Your third co-founder ("the dragon has three heads") should be a crack technologist. Someone even better than you, if you can find him, and not a friend of the business co-founder. If you have two business guys and one technologist, you're not going to have a tech company and they (along with investors) will be calling the shots. In general, you want someone who will push back on technical matters where getting it right is more important than personally winning but always take your side on the political stuff, where the reverse is true.

Once you've established this "initial three" (or 4, if the technical problem merits it) you can hire more business people, but only for defined roles (accounting, business development) and anyone who tries to turn one of your initial team against the rest is fired immediately.

Don't hire a PM until you're at 30 people. "Product" people become necessary when you're hiring second-string engineers. First-stringers PM their own work.

mgirdley• 12 years ago

I went through a similar experience recently. My solution:

1) Find a place where startup people hang out (in San Antonio, there's a co-working space designed for this called Geekdom). Startup people are rarely found in big companies.

2) Find ways to get involved in the startup community by volunteering or just helping others. You'll determine very quickly who are the quality people and who you'll like working with.

3) Get an idea and go talk to everyone about it. Ask for their advice and get mentored. Even if it's a bad idea, you'll develop relationships and they'll connect you to other startup people who can help or possibly get involved.

bjones53• 12 years ago

I agree, the startup community can be a great place to meet potential partners.

To extend on something you mentioned, I suggest that you look for volunteer opportunities outside the startup community. The startup community is great, but volunteering with different organizations exposes you to people with diverse backgrounds and different skill sets. Volunteering is great for building a network of people with skills that compliment yours; it allows you to develop genuine relationships with likeminded individuals.

cottonseed• 12 years ago

I met a business guy at a meetup in Boston last week who was doing something in exactly this space and looking to build an engineering team. But it looks like I threw his card out. Shit, sorry.

dj-wonk• 12 years ago

I agree with most of the advice here. In addition, I'd suggest finding ways to vet people before you commit to a "full" cofounder role. Some ways that work for me:

  * Write about the topics and projects that you want to work on
  * Connect with people with similar interests
  * Make time to do small trial projects
  * Get outside your comfort zone
  * Focus on building something and/or testing a business hypothesis
  * Structure your collaborations with tangible deliverables

Once you find some starter projects -- assuming that you are starting off without external funding -- I highly suggest using a dynamic equity split based on time and resources contributed.

Give people a nice out (e.g. "thanks for helping test out that idea, sorry it didn't pan out like we hoped") if the project doesn't work well. Think of it like dating.

tair• 12 years ago

This is unbelievable. I was just now writing another related post over here regarding my startup to solve this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8097145

I will follow up here also. Thank you for the question!

JSeymourATL• 12 years ago

Don't underestimate your own abilities to develop a business, network, find & manage money. Conversely, it's easy to overestimate those skills in others.

bbulkow2• 12 years ago

+1 on this, big time.

As a technical guy who became funded & CEO now CTO, getting a business plan both is, and isn't, rocket science.

Ask yourself: what would an investor want to know?

They want to know how expensive to develop, time horizon, risks, possible positive outcomes.

That's all a business plan is. If you haven't answered this for yourself, or it's just a "feeling" not backed up by data, then you don't really know it.

Run this past your friends, people who will give you a straight answer.

The entrepreneurial spirit is taking the bull by the horns and wrestling, not saying "I'm not a business guy." Try it yourself.

If you try it yourself, and "fail", you'll learn the kind of business guy who adds value, then you can look intelligently and correctly.

If you try and succeed, well, there you are.

spinlock• 12 years ago

I would go to car lots and talk to as many salesmen as you can. You might find someone who's interested and they would have industry experience. Set a goal of 100 car lots and hit the pavement. When you're done you might not have a partner but you'll have a lot of data.

Then, choose another venue, lather, rinse, repeat. You just need to dedicate yourself to solving this priblem. Good luck.

wusatiuk• 12 years ago

I would also suggest not to look for a cofounder, per se. Try to get a working MVP and get some progress yourself. Even if you are a pure software guy, you are easily able to learn the 1x1 of business development as biz dev is nothing more than 0 and 1. :) I mean, the rules are the same for code & business. There are some variables, some loops, some functions, that is it.

I would not specifically search for a cofounder, but search for the right people who can help you to push the product, even without getting 30% of your company. people who like to talk about idea, help you with daily problem startup problems,...

within a very short time, you will learn much about people, how they act and you will soon find one or more people who are really interested in pushing you project forward.

just because i am curious - is the tool planned for the european or us market?

valarauca16• 12 years ago

Both that standards organization I'm within/from is based in the EU, but is strongly catching on within the US. Several companies have adopted within just a year.

I'm based in the US, but there will be an EU market.

ldec• 12 years ago

I agree with most of the comments here, but wanted to add that when you are ready, if you are in the US, most business schools have an 'entrepreneurship club' or something similar, which mostly have a group of business-savvy people desperately looking for technical co-founders. The students running these clubs will be very receptive to an email from someone like you.

arsalanb• 12 years ago

I want to share an experience that I think will provide a different perspective. Might not be true in everybody's case, but just my two cents.

People often claim that having a deep-rooted work history and relation with a person and knowing them well suggests they could be somebody you can work on a startup with. My experience has proven, that this isn't always true. Having somebody you know inside-out work on you with a startup is a good thing, but also make sure that you don't mix your emotions with your work.

Your best-friend or fiancé might make a great co-founder (considering they work in the same space as you), but it always makes it harder to talk business with them. Emotions are always ugliest when they surface in work conditions. Your cofounder is slacking? Just give them a subtle reminder. Oh wait, now you can't because he's also your best friend so he expects you to let this slide.

Bad for business, worse when said business is in its earliest stages.

7Figures2Commas• 12 years ago

Short answer: don't.

Long answer: if you feel you can't get started in any meaningful way on your own, hire somebody who can assist you. While truly good people can be hard to find, it will be a thousand times easier to find a competent paid consultant than a competent co-founder. After all, why in the world would somebody experienced who has valuable skills that can be monetized want to start a business with someone he or she doesn't have a long-standing relationship with? The folks who would be interested in this are precisely the folks you want to avoid.

Additional benefits of paying instead of partnering include the ability to retain full control and ownership of your business (if one materializes) as well as the ability to quickly and cleanly terminate the person you retain if he or she is unable to meet your needs.

If the person you retain delivers and there's a great personal fit that would lend itself to an ongoing collaboration, there's nothing stopping you from later negotiating a co-founder relationship.

rmena1232• 12 years ago

In a perfect world yea it would be great to find someone from working on projects or school or years and years of knowing someone. I am in the same position as you, I am more of a designer/business guy. I don't have years to wait around and hope someone pops up. I am not sure what will happen in the future, but I know this it comes down to luck and no one way, I don't care what YC says, yes in a perfect world they maybe right, but I live it now and so do you.

taksintik2• 12 years ago

Finance / biz development guy here. It's real hard talking long term monetization strategy with some developers. I've tried cofounders meetings but been unable to find a The right type of hungry. I think it may be the fact that i live in Thailand. A country rich in programming drifters.

valarauca16• 12 years ago

Most programmers (in the USA, let alone developing country I assume) are heavily philosophically influenced by the free software movement.

The idea of selling a lot of software for money is kinda foreign to developers who learned their trained purely from the internet. Even me I'd rather make an open source project and sell support rather then just sell black box software.

taksintik2• 12 years ago

I hear what your saying but I just don't get it. It's all how we view things I guess. From my perspective Making money while solving problems is good thing. No reason to be shy about it.

charlie123517• 12 years ago

Hey, I just created a Facebook group for entrepreneurs to collaborate, feel free to check it out: https://www.facebook.com/groups/318404371669625/

exelius• 12 years ago

So you're software guy and you can build things. You even have an idea of what to build.

The "business/money" part of things is easy. If you get big enough, you can hire an accountant to do most of that for you. The "networking" thing is pretty easy too: you can hire salespeople for that.

What you need is someone who knows this industry from a strategic standpoint: who are your competitors, who are your customers, and how do you sell to them? What do they even want? What value does your product give them over a more generic data warehousing solution?

I can tell you right now that your idea is neither novel nor particularly valuable (if your customers are big multinational companies, it's just a little custom reporting code on top of their enterprise data warehousing platform). Until you turn it into a product that serves some customer's needs, it will remain without value. But what you need is someone who understands the market enough to be able to tell you these things.

I would say your best option would be to find someone in the industry and say "Hey, I have a business idea I'd like to bounce off of you". Don't worry about people stealing your idea -- if it's worth doing, someone has probably already done it. That doesn't mean there's not an opportunity though, and you just need to find someone qualified to judge that.

dzink• 12 years ago

A good way to increase your chances of finding one is to do a lot of small projects with different people who complement your skills. You have to work with someone first to know if you are a good fit for something bigger (think of it as dating before marriage). This is easier when you are on a campus environment (which is why facebook and google started on campuses), and harder once you're out of school.

We created http://www.doerhub.com as a free tool to fix that. People from different disciplines (from surgery, to hacking, AI, business, law, 3d printing and human rights ) post what they are working on/passionate about and anyone who likes their project can contribute by joining, advising, becoming a beta user, doing a task etc. They collaborate right on the site or outside of it. You can share areas you are advanced in and learning in so you can discover complementary people easily http://peoplesearch-doerhub.herokuapp.com/viz/ and do private or public projects.

Other than individual SV doers, UChicago was first full organization in our beta http://www.doerhub.com/at/uchicago (1/3rd of the finalists and both winners of their New Venture Challenge and Social New Venture Challenge were using the site). And now we are opening it for free to other universities, hackathons, hack clubs and organizations who want people to get stuff done with others, instead of just talking about it.

When I (a hacker) posted this drone project http://www.doerhub.com/for/personaldrone a pilot with military experience and a VC I didn't know ended up joining me. Here are some other doerhub-powered teams:

http://www.doerhub.com/for/kikisauceco

http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc

http://www.doerhub.com/for/bluetooth-sensor

http://www.doerhub.com/for/robopaint

http://www.doerhub.com/for/qcare

http://www.doerhub.com/for/surgery-boards-app

sogen• 12 years ago

How does it work? Is it legally binding? How do teams work/organize themselves?

I see very few projects fill any information or what/who they need.

Ask HN: How to find co-founders

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