[ilaksh]

For finding a technical co-founder, I think this is more like it:

Imagine you are looking for someone to marry and to cook for you. You will have to get along with them for years. You will need to share intimate secrets with them. The main thing that is really different is that you will not be having sex with them (although from what I hear that is not actually very different from most marriages).

The other thing is that instead of cooking food, they are doing engineering research. Pretty much all software projects are complex research projects. Now, imagine if the woman you married were a bad cook. You could always go out for takeout after dinner lots of the time. But say your entire business was built on making sure that her eggplant soufflé or whatever was 100% on point. If it doesn't taste good, it just crashes and you can't make money. But this is not eggplant soufflé its a completely new dish you need her to invent as a master chef. Only its more complicated than that. It has a thousand moving parts. Its sort of like they are inventing a new type of space ship for you.

So anyway, I would try to do smaller test projects or subprojects with people first and be very careful making a selection of a partner. Ideally it would take several months or a few years, checking out multiple people.

Also be aware that about 50% of all marriages end in divorce.

[baddox]

Finding a spouse or long-term romantic partner certainly seems like an apt analogy, but I wonder if the analogy really holds for any specifics beyond the empirical observation that a significant percentage of both marriages and businesses “fail.” I put that in quotation marks, because I’m not convinced that the “success” criteria for either are well-defined. The standard view for marriages seems to be that any marriage that ends before one partner dies was a failure, but I don’t see why a separation or divorce necessarily implies that there wasn’t a net benefit for both partners. Likewise, if a business eventually ceases to exist, I don’t think that necessarily implies that the founders didn’t benefit on net (even if there was no obvious benefit, like a payout). I claim this even though I realize that both “failures” must usually cause considerable pain and/or hardship for all participants for some amount of time.

[rothbardrand]

The implied power structure here is so typical.

Way too many startup “CEOs” want to sit on their ass watching TV and drinking beer (eg going to conferences and drinking beer) while their partner builds the product based on their incoherent and ever changing whims.