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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought people desperately looking for cofounders on HN, or asking how to find them, are kind of goofy and lame. Has there ever been an even moderately successful company cofounded by strangers who met while slumming the internet for cofounders?

It seems to me that PG almost certainly didn't mean people were better off starting companies with random strangers than they would be starting off alone.

Looking at the big successful companies that were started with multiple founders, it was almost always a group of friends, or co-workers, or acquaintances from school with similar interests, or something like that. There's more to being "cofounders" than just meeting randomly and deciding to start a company together.

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I've been that person, and that's exactly how I felt while I was doing it. I don't try anymore, the hours were for nothing and it's a complete waste of time.

A cofounder needs a very strong skillset, a life circumstance that permits them to drop everything for a startup without dire consequences, a level of enthusiasm and drive that to other people seems almost delusional, and your opportunity needs to out-compete all their other opportunities for more than a year. That's an incredibly rare person. There are probably more successful pop stars than there are people who fit that profile.

PG says if you're solo, you should look for a cofounder. When he gave that advice, it was because he observed that the majority of successful startups had multiple cofounders. But I don't think he bothered to consider the fact that approximately zero of those confounders met each other by going on a "cofounder search."

agree, and I'll extend it to finding cofounders through hackathons too. It's a huge ask for both parties, especially since you'll be financially and mentally be in each other's pockets the whole time.

You don't do that to someone you've just met. That's akin to proposing after a one night hookup on Tinder.

how did you and your cofounder meet?

not the OP, but I met mine in grad school. We were working on different projects in a similar area. We really only decided to become cofounders after a year of graduating, because finishing one thesis and immediately hopping to another seemed like the fastest way to a burnout.

If I were starting a company, I would do it by myself or possibly with some friends. I'm very weary of the VC based startup bubble and don't have much interest in starting a company.

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