| Hi Nick, I would recommend taking your time to select your co-founder.
I believe it is not only about finding someone that loves your idea, and that has matching technical skills. Sharing equity with someone, even if you can provide the security of an income, is like entering a marriage. Any confusion, lack of communication, conflicts (and there will be no matter what) will impact your team (this comes from a start-up team member that witnessed poor decision-making due to a lack of cooperation between founders). Make sure you both have a similar vision of entrepreneurship and take your time to work with the person so you can both experiment difficulties together and see if you trust your co-founder. You can find contractors to get you started (with an open-source framework like web2py so that your CTO will easily be able to pick up the work). I have applied this to my project, selected potential tech co-founders because I enjoyed working with them on various occasions (work, school, start-up week-ends ...) and asked for small, paid tasks that a mentor verified for me.
It is supposed to be the hardest part in entrepreneurship so I wish you the best going forward on this search for your co-founder. I know Europe has less Tech/Start-up events to attend (I live in France) but if you can I would recommend networking, meeting as many programmers as you can. There are a lot of events registered on Meetup.com in London.
http://www.meetup.com/cities/gb/17/london/tech/ Good luck ! |