"Match.com" for startup founders / co-founders | Hacker News Reader

"Match.com" for startup founders / co-founders

startupwithme.com

63 pointsfnazeeri35 comments

My bet is that most of the people on their site are non-technical. There is nothing wrong with that, but it always seems like there are way more non-technical cofounder candidates that technical cofounder candidates. I've always wanted to work with a cofounder who is way more technical than I am, but I usually end up with junior developers in the projects I do. What are your opinions on how the starting team's skillset?

I think that there is something wrong with that. I have found that business co-founders are a dime a dozen but tech co-founders are extremely hard to find and in high demand. Oddly enough this creates the same situation that you find on traditional dating sites (e.g.: too many men not enough women). But even with that said. It seems like a cool idea and I hope they do well.

On the flip side, I find it difficult to find a business co-founder. Knowing little about business, I'm concerned with finding someone who will work well with me, but who is also good. How do I rate certain factors? What do I look for?

I think it's a real problem. How, as a developer, can I find someone who really is a business person, and not just someone who isn't technical. You see, there are a lot of non-technical people interested, but not as many people who are actually proficient. Business people is such a generic term. What aspect of business is someone good at?

Maybe that's an issue with what I'm looking for. Not a business person. A "business person" is like asking for a "developer." I mean, really, what is a "business person." It's like labeling myself as a "developer." What does that tell you?

Absolutely nothing useful.

Just like traditional dating it's just numbers. Go out and meet people. Then you two should go on dates and test the relationship. Seriously. My friends linked up because they only called and talked to each other at 2 in the morning. Someone else I know went to Burning Man and became a dev/biz team. Using an OKCupid for startup founders seems silly though.

I met my wife on OPN (Now FreeNode) back in 2001. =) So yeah, I sorta never followed the traditional dating route. However, your point is understood. And yes, I do need to go out and meet new people.

A general business person is not much use to a technical startup early on. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, every business has only two core functions: innovation, or marketing. So any "business" co-founder had better be awesome at marketing/sales (those are related, but not the same), preferably with domain knowledge and people-access in the market of interest that's difficult for outsiders to get. Typically, you could evaluate those skills by outputs: reading a marketing document, seeing a presentation, and drilling them with questions. Just like with programming jobs, titles don't mean much; there's no shortage of schmoozers and BS'ers who can't actually do marketing well, especially in the fluid, fast context of a startup.

Beyond those business skills, you'd likely want the usual requirements of any co-founder: integrity, and a record of getting things done.

Sounds good. I'd hope to be in high demand. I'd rather be in high demand in the local dating scene, to be honest but then, this isn't Lovesick Hacker News, so I'll keep that to myself.

Another issue here is that IMHO all the best teams are formed organically (e.g.: Google Guys @ Stanford / FB Guys @ Harvard etc...) and not out of a direct inent to form a startup. As we all know running a startup w/ a co-founder is like being married. 1 issue that this site could run into is that just like on dating sites its very difficult to establish a significant amount of rapport and I would argue that having a good rapport with your co-founder is just as important as having a good rapport with someone that you want to date. Instead of using a site like this you should look around and determine which of the people you know and like would be the best fit in the role of co-founder. Something like Facebook or linked in would be a good place to search your network for potential startup co-founders. Or if you are like me you just start a project and annoy all your friends to test/review/help etc... so much that they either stop talking to you or become your co-founder.

This sounds word-for-word like the arguments against online dating. Not saying they aren't valid points, just drawing the parallel.

if you're technical and want to meet other potential tech founders, try going to meetups on technical topics or create your own. You'll get to know all kinds of smart people.

You could have said that about relationships 10 years ago.

Disclaimer: happily married to a woman I met on match.com 7 years ago.

Interesting idea and I hope it works out.

The problem I see is that you can't exactly apply the online dating model to finding a co-founder. With online dating, you presumably date a number of people before finding someone acceptable/awesome. Sometimes it takes multiple dates to figure things out for sure.

But for a start-up founder, you can't go start multiple companies just to be sure they are the one. You need a level of trust and an ability to work together that you just can't get from a couple of lunch meetings.

I do hope they can prove me wrong though, because that would be awesome.

The problem you're describing applies to marriage (or other long-term relationships) as well.

It seems to me that the best way around this problem isn't to create a site which aims at getting people "married", but at getting them to go out on a few "dates" together. In other words, doing some short-term projects together before committing for the long haul.

Great point. Co-founders should "date" and not do shotgun weddings.

Having used Match.com for dating, I would never refer to another site I thought favorably of as "Match.com for x". Does that mean the response rate is low, and it's full of people desperate to make a commitment?

I'm seeing more and more of these sites/solutions spring up but none of them seem to really work.

Why?

My thoughts:

Partly an issue of signal to noise / matching, finding the right person in the first place.

Partly frustration at unsuitable cold calls through cofounder matching sites (I listed on one to see if I could find an additional technical cofounder and got a ton of business contacts in areas that were totally mismatched to my interests and skills).

Partly lack of obvious second step, in a way. Exchange emails, meet, decide what to do next (small project or something, parallel with dating pre-commitment, I suppose). But this isn't foolproof and is very high-touch. Maybe this is just me though.

Clever idea however also like Match.com I envision 90% of the users here to be the male, aka non-technical types with an idea and no engineer to implement it. The other 10% is mediocre looking women maybe looking to mingle if something extraordinary comes around, aka a half decent engineer who just might partner if something exceptional comes around. But hey what do I know, I met my wife on a dating site and I couldn't be happier right now.

From a UI perspective, just my opinion, the site is somewhat obnoxious. First of all, you have to sign up to see what the site is all about. Then, when I tried to leave feedback, it required me to give my credentials (Twitter, Google, MSN, etc). This is bad UX... it doesn't allow me to get a sample of the site easily.

http://cofoundergoogledocs.com :)

This seems like a very nice idea, but it feels rough around the edges even for a MVP...

Given the likely supply-demand imbalance (more biz types/fewer technical types), it might be good to give some way for the biz types to show they are 'desirable' to help the technical folks sift through them to find the most promising.

I'm guessing there must be some legitimate assessment/test created by some credible institution to assess someone's "entrepreneurial'ness". Of course, such a test won't be infallible, but it might help attract the tech types if they can screen the biz types easily on a few dimensions.

There's no way to filter by location. It's showing me all these folks from North Carolina and I'm probably not interested if someone's on the other side of the country.

I'm seeing people in other countries, I could really do with filtering them out.

Hi I'm one of the co-founders of the project. Will definitely put this in the queue as we work on the next release. Thanks for the feedback!

I would ask this question in the profile page:

As a founder, you would take the time to fill out all those following questions?

[yes no]

I think Match.com itself needs a tech cofounder. Login and Join us takes lot of time. I gave up after some time.

great idea, I am very close to beta launching a London centric site with the same concept, guess numbers is the biggest issue in this game. can have the best ebay killer but if too few use it, it's pointless.

All the pictures are old white businessmen.

A real start-up matching site would have lots of 20-somethings, with about half foreigners, who have written some code.

I think the site just launched so it wouldn't be surprising if it's not yet representative of founders generally.

As an aside, I was recently reading a draft of HBS prof. Noam Wasserman's upcoming book on early founder issues, and one of the things he writes about is that homophilic teams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily) underperform heterogeneous teams.

'foreigners' is relative to who YOU are.

Everybody is a foreigner somewhere. (Relatedly, everyone has an impenetrable accent, and everyone has a weird esoteric name that breaks our system and should be changed to fit in.)

Nice idea, could use a lot of improvement though... Some initial feedback (as I'm attempting to fill out a profile):

Personality Which profile is most like you?

- Vision/strategy: see 1-2 years ahead, predict trends, write vision document, and inspire a team

- Implementation/execution: build a product, follow a great plan, detail-oriented, manage daily operations

I'd be nice if those were checkboxes, it's perfectly reasonable for a person to embody all of those personality traits. In general it would be nice if there was more flexibility in the profile.

I came here to post that on that subject, as well.

>We believe that founder teams need a good mix of strengths in both vision/strategy and implementation/execution. We will match you with potential co-founders who complement your strengths, ie: the opposite of you.

It's as if match.com (and I have never used match.com, so maybe this analogy is bad) said:

>We believe that marriages need a good mix of strengths in both leader/decision-maker and cooking/cleaning/listening quietly. We will match you with potential mates who complement your strengths, ie: the opposite of you.

Oh, fun.

I'd be looking for someone who is willing to do "whatever seems like the biggest win" at the time, and who can change plans on no notice.

I'd also be looking for someone who will get their hands dirty implementing. It's not just the amount of work required, although that's reason enough. It indicates the humility necessary for the enterprise to work.

It's "gee honey, you know I sure appreciate the hard work you did cooking this meal while I was sitting on the couch" versus getting in the kitchen and making good food happen cooperatively.

Thanks for the feedback. It'll be a straightforward fix.

A site co-founder here. Great idea, this is much more of a continuum from vision to execution (sort of like extrovert vs. introvert) than a binary issue. I agree. We'll consider a new type of input option for many questions that are structured like this. Also, it's certainly worth mentioning that we are taking a risk by trying to match opposites to allow for many different skillsets in a team. Although Dr. Wasserman's research right now supports this variety in founding teams I think much more research needs to be done along these lines. We hope to help collect some of this data over time to be more confident in our approach through feedback from users on the site. Thanks for taking a look at the site and helping with your comments. More updates to the system coming soon. - Aaron

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