Ask YC: Finding a co-founder(s)

[jond2062]

I've been out of school for almost a year and a half now, working as a financial analyst for a large finance/accounting firm in Los Angeles. I've known for quite some time that I won't be truly happy working for a large company and that entrepreneurship is in my blood (no one in my family works for anyone else). I also spent two years in college doing sales for a small web services/software company and got a lot of exposure to the development of a SAAS solution and the web as it relates to small-to-mid-size businesses. I spend a significant portion of my free time researching the web, writing mock business plans, and trying to develop ideas that I have.

But the one thing I continue to struggle with is finding someone else who wants to form a startup. I work with some very smart people, but the problem is, their whole game plan is built around climbing the corporate ladder, whereas mine couldn't be more opposite. So what is the best strategy for someone like myself to find a trustworthy, hard working partner to form a startup? I fully respect what programmers/engineers/hackers bring to the table and I feel that I would compliment those skills very well. I also have a pretty good understanding of the web and wouldn't consider myself one of those "pie-in-the-sky" business types that are responsible for that stereotype. I'm just a guy looking to build something cool, solve some problems, and maybe make enough to quit my day-job. Sorry for the long post, but what are your thoughts?

[aaronblohowiak]

Restating your problem: the circles I run in now don't have what I am looking for, how can I find what I am looking for? Simple answer: change the circles you run in. Go to the watering hole for the prey you want to take down -- users groups, coworking facilities, and professional networks like workingwithrails and linkedin. Then, do a small test project, then try a harder project together. Expect to go through many before you find the one that fits.

'Just because you've become a young man now (Man, now) There's still some things that you don't understand now (Son, now) Before you ask some girl for her hand now (My son) Keep your freedom for as long as you can now'

My mama told me...'you better shop around' (Shop, shop around) a-whoa-yeah You better (uh-huh) shop around! (Shop, shop around) Uh-uh-uh

[mechanical_fish]

+1, Gratuitous Musical Interlude

[Rod]

+1, Gratuitous, yet hilarious, musical interlude ;-)

It cracked me up, LOL

[bkovitz]

I found a co-founder by posting on craigslist.

We have very different styles: I am improvisational, creative, always willing to try an idea, in love with writing beautiful code, mostly driven by aesthetics and idealism. He is organized, managerial, skeptical, oriented toward business and negotiation and the world of money, good at researching and finding out how other people have solved a problem, though he still enjoys code.

We have disagreements sometimes, but it's working well. The disagreements have turned out fruitful. That's probably how it should be.

[jond2062]

How many people did you interview before you found your current co-founder?

[bkovitz]

Three.

The ad I placed was not for a co-founder, but for someone to pair-program with me. At my cube-farm day job at the time, I hadn't found anyone willing to try pair-programming. I missed pairing, and I knew from past experience that I'm way more productive when pairing. I figured that with a pair, I would likely get one of my personal projects done. So I placed an ad looking for a student to pair-program with me on my projects. I offered to pay $15/hour, since the main compensation for a student would be the technical know-how he'd pick up from someone with more experience (I've been coding for roughly 20 years).

After about one session or so, though, $15/hour seemed stupid. It made more sense that we would each have a stake in a product. It's been way better to have someone who takes initiative than a student who waits to be told what to do.

[webwright]

Hrm. This seems like it CAN work (clearly) but is really sub-optimal... Like hunting for a wife on dating sites or hunting for an employee in a resume database. A lot (but not all) of the best options aren't going to put themselves out there as targets because the signal-to-noise ratio is so bad.

I'd second the "find the watering hole where your prey is" comment.

[fallentimes]

Wow that story sounds familiar. I was out of school for two years working as a financial analyst before getting accepted in to YC this summer.

Right out of school and six months in to my job I knew I wasn't really cut out for finance and preferred to not work for someone else. I started a business on the side and learned more in 3 months than I did all through college. Fast forward a year. A childhood friend of mine and I began collaborating on an idea I had whenever we had spare time. However, we were eventually faced with a Catch22 situation: we needed more time to work on our startup, but we also needed money to live on (my other side business was making decent money, but not enough to live off of). We were OK with this and planned on doing the startup on the side until it was making money, or at least launched.

On a whim we applied to YC as we figured "why the hell not?" YC accepted us even though I was a non-technical. I'm not exactly sure why as I've never actually asked them, but I will offer some speculation: my partner is a genius and I was extremely familiar with the market we were trying to get in to.

Looking back, if we would have been rejected, I would have learned to code. Even now I plan on doing so (and have already done some) once things are a little less hectic. Obviously, YC has sped up the creation process considerably and we've gotten more done in ~1.5 months than all the previous time combined.

So I guess my advice to you is this: 1. Start a business on the side if you can 2. Learn to hack 3. Follow aaronblohowiak's advice 4. Forget the mock business plans - I've run/ran 3 small to micro sized businesses and the closest thing I've done to completing a business plan is a YC Summer 08 application. At some point, you have to stop planning and start doing.

Good luck and feel free to email me anytime.

[jond2062]

Thanks for the advice and I couldn't agree more. Ending the planning and beginning the doing is the theme of my day today. Trouble is, since im not a programmer, me "doing" something would consist of market research, putting my ideas on paper (i.e. summary business plans), and trying to network. If I knew that I could turn one of my ideas into even a small reality, then I would have plenty more to do in terms of copywriting, marketing, etc. I just need to either begin an active search for a hacker co-founder, pursue a non-software type of startup, or try to outsource the development.

[fallentimes]

The business you start doesn't necessarily have to be web related - it can be anything.

[lbrandy]

The long term answer is to build a hacker network. That's going to be hard.

There is no good short-term answer but here's the only way: asking in the right places (like here) and getting very lucky. Being specific will help:

Do you have actual ideas? Do you bring domain knowledge to the table? Are your ideas niche to that domain? Do you know what type of business you'd want to run (bootstrapped/VC)? How are you going to get funding?

As a programmer, I know several hackers who are looking to start a business in the next year or so. If you had good answers to the above questions, I'd consider putting you in touch with them. Regardless, though, you are going to want to be specific as possible when asking. It's the only way of even having a chance.

Bonus tip: Put your email address in your profile before asking questions like this. You never know who might email you out of the blue.

[jond2062]

Point very well taken and I appreciate your advice.

I have several ideas that I feel have potential, but I am open to working with someone elses dream idea just the same (in my opinion it's less about the idea and more about the execution). I boostrap my life and would expect to run a startup in much the same way. Depending on the type of startup, however, VC funding may very well be valuable. I have advanced Excel modeling skills and I build financial models everyday. I have experience working with numerous small to mid size companies and closed $10k-$20k web projects with my clients on a consistent basis while I was a junior/senior in college. I'm obviously not a programmer, but I learned enough to basically run the sales efforts for this company, make us a leader in working with alternative energy clients, and make clients comfortable with sending a $10k check to a small company they had never even heard of before.

[zacharye]

I'm in a similar boat, in a way. I'm currently playing with the idea of founding a web service-based company but as I research the technology behind my concept (I would be a non-technical founder) I continuously come across accounts of how difficult it is for people in my situation. If you come across an engineer ready to take the leap into the world of start ups, odds are pretty good they intend to work on their own ideas. If you come across an engineer who's already been in the fray and is ready to do it again, (s)he has no interest in talking to someone like me.

I'm a marketing / biz dev / product dev guy and I can spec a project, help lead a project, manage a team, compose great copy for the site / service / collateral, get the word out through a fair network I've built and market the out of it, make use of some contacts to pitch for funding, etc etc. These are the things I've been doing for the past nine years. What I can't do is build the product myself.

It's a tough game, and it's all about networking. I'm talking to friends of friends of friends but little has come of it to this point. So I'll keep at it and be persistent in the hopes that one day soon I'll have a conversation with a skilled engineer looking to lead instead of follow and we'll see eye to eye.

[kleinsch]

Zacharye - Engineer here who might be interested. Send me your email address and we can talk. nick [dot] kleinschmidt [at] gmail.com

[khangtoh]

Nick, Zacharye

I'm a Rails coder, can lead project and define architecture. Getting ready for YC spring 2009. Looking for the business side partners who can sell and promote the hell out of a SaaS idea that will be big time for small and medium businesses. Hackers are welcomed too! Email address in my profile.

[davidw]

I get the feeling, from most things I read, that co founders should be someone you've already known for years, not someone you find from one day to the next, so it's sort of a catch-22.

[jond2062]

You hit the nail on the head. The problem is, most of my peer network are people who see the allure of money in the finance world and want to work their way up the ladder. And the engineers that I know are not yet ready to break out and do something on their own.

[aggieben]

That's exactly the problem I've had. There's 2-3 people I've worked with in the last 3 years I've approached about getting our nuts out of the corporate lock-box, and none of them have any interest. With two of them, you can tell immediately that the thought of leaving a corporate position for their own enterprise has never even crossed their minds. The other one overestimates the risk involved.

sigh

[jfornear]

You live in Dallas right? Good luck finding anyone here that hasn't been raised to climb the corporate ladder. I'm still in school, but I also find it pretty depressing to be around so many people that don't like thinking big or taking risks.

[aggieben]

Yup. It's just in the water, I think. It's starting to get better, particularly in the East parts, like Plano and Richardson. There's an incubator in Richardson, actually - it's called Star Tech Early Ventures (startechev.com). I've been talking with them, but it's not quite the same model as YC, as best I can tell (i.e., their interests are a little more diverse than those of YC, I think - make what you will of that).

[lsc]

My problem is recognising tallent outside of your core compentencies.

If you can recognise tallent, it's easy enough to pick up people who are on the rebound from bad jobs, or who haven't gotten much paid experience yet. I regularly hire friends of friends, but then I hang out with very technical people who have very technical friends. I've picked up a lot of really good technical people with little experience and paid 'em $15/hr to work for me... most of them leave for better pay after a year or so, but if I was compitent at business, I'd be able to pay them more by then.

My big problem is that if you are incompetent at something, you can't reconise compitence. I am an incompitent business person, so I can't recognise a good sales/businessperson. Even with a good solid technical team, you need business compitency to succeed, and there isn't much of that in my social circle, and even if there was, I wouldn't be able to tell the good from the pretenders.

It sounds like I need to get together with someone like you, but who? I mean, I alrealdy said, I can't tell if someone is a compitent businessperson, and having the wrong CEO is much worse, imo, than having no CEO at all.

[aaronblohowiak]

recognizing talent is one thing that humans are amazingly bad at, as recent HN stories about malcom's new book and the nytimes article about competent vs nice coworkers have suggested.

i dont know if an iterative model can work in staffing.

this is why experience is so valued by companies -- if you've done stuff, then you are able to do stuff (though, maybe you're a big faker who got lucky.)

[lsc]

I think recognizing talent in the context of an interview is difficult, but not impossibly so. I think judging how well they work, (do they 'get stuff done') is much more difficult during interviews, unless the person has solo projects. I know working for others, I've recommended several 'smart but useless' people after interviewing. Usually when hiring people I know, though, I know in what ways they are useless, and can hire for positions where I can make up for their weaknesses.

but I don't think it's difficult to judge a person if you have known them for a while, especially if you are the type to talk about technical things in social contexts.

I think the problem appears when you are judging things outside your field, or people you only see for an hour.

[aaronblohowiak]

Yes, agreed. I should have specified the scope limitation to my statement of the interview context.

[khangtoh]

I'm a Rails coder, can lead project and define architecture. Getting ready for YC spring 2009. Looking for the business side partners who can sell and promote the hell out of a SaaS idea that will be big time for small and medium businesses. Email address in my profile.

Getting ready for YC spring 2009.

[ScottWhigham]

If you think it's hard now, just wait until you start the business, it becomes mildly successful, and now you want to bring in someone as a co-founder to help you grow - it's twice as hard then. I'm going through that right now and it's tough.

I don't think cofounders need be friends before starting - I think that like-minded people hang around each other so, if you're in an area like the Valley, there are more people of your mindset and you'll find it easier to co-found with a friend. I think co-founding is tough and there are no easy ways of doing it.

[ecommercematt]

A post-founding co-founder?

[sachinag]

We just got one. Co-founder isn't about the title, it's about the state of mind.

Our company started with having a local dev firm doing initial coding, then we got him to do some work on the site on nights. Then he decided he really wanted to give it a shot, and I welcomed him with open arms. He gets a ton of equity and is a co-founder in my mind: there are no secrets, no employer/employee relationship. Yes, I spent a ton of my own cash to get the business off the ground, but it only has a chance at success with a full-time partner. So he's a co-founder in my mind, and publicly.

[bluelu]

How do you define tons of equity? 40%? 30%?

[kynikos]

The best advice I can give is to go out to local industry networking events and turn to groups like HN to join discussions and engage other people. By doing this you're more likely to find someone who is truly like-minded and knowledgeable about the same space you're looking to get into. You're also more likely to find a technical co-founder, which undoubtedly expedites product development because you come from a business background.

[dtang4]

My friend pointed me to your thread. I am in a very similar situation.

I've been out of school for a little of 2 yrs and work in LA as a mgmt consultant. I've been developing sites for a number of years, and currently run a couple social networking sites and a search engine, among others. Send me an email if you're interested to meet up for coffee or something. My email is dtang4 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks.

[jond2062]

Sent you a message jond2062 [at] gmail [.] com

[noel_gomez]

I'm in the same boat. I am in Product Management and fairly technically oriented, but I wouldn't call myself a real programmer.

Since I have not found people of like mind I have tried to learn enough to try to do something on my own. But not having built a web service in the past, it's not that easy. I would be happy finding a mentor who could point me in the right direction while I learn.

[OpenWebU]

Another approach is to hire contractors overseas to build exactly what you'd like. Rentacoder, elance and odesk are great resources.