Ask YC: Finding a co-founder(s)

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.<p>'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'<p>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

I found a co-founder by posting on craigslist.<p>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.<p>We have disagreements sometimes, but it's working well. The disagreements have turned out fruitful. That's probably how it should be.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Good luck and feel free to email me anytime.

The long term answer is to build a hacker network. That's going to be hard.<p>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:<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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 <i></i><i></i> 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.<p>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.

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.

My problem is recognising tallent outside of your core compentencies.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>Getting ready for YC spring 2009.

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 <i>tough</i>.<p>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.

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.

My friend pointed me to your thread. I am in a very similar situation.<p>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.<p>Thanks.

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

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