[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.