What We Look for in Founders

There's no one "perfect person" that will succeed, although the article by PG would imply otherwise (since YC only wants entrepreneurs and start-ups that will be successful...hence the application/interview questions).

The key is to use your core strengths to your advantage.

I just connected with an old friend who saw something I just built and wants to join in. If you build something that's cool, people will indeed want to join in.

OTOH, pursuing most of these things is probably a good thing for general reasons. Hacking some non software thing, if you do not tend to do that sort of thing will probably benefit your thinking. Making friends is obviously good for you too.

I think it boils down to this: Do you tolerate bullshit or do you proactively stack the deck for personal advantage?

In this case you leveraged the hell out of a unique personal quirk and created an opportunity for yourself that wouldn't otherwise exist. To use a poker analogy (Thanks, Tony Hsieh), you picked the table where you knew you could win. You knew you'd do better at the college level and you exploited information asymmetry with both the college administrator and your college-level peers.

This is the very essence of how successful people and businesses work. You also showed some moxy and cunning with someone much older and more powerful than you, which is unusual at that age.

You thought many moves ahead and won, reaping huge upside. That's 98th percentile at least, man.

On the one hand, it seems somewhat insincere to approach someone with solutions and not immediately make your wants clear, but on the other it's a win-win all round.

This didn't used to describe me. I was quite happy being Mr. Fortune 500. The 5 years or so back, I went after one startup, then another, then I just applied to YC. I must have some kind of flexibility, determination, etc. to have gotten this far. Time will tell how much of the qualities described I have.

Yes, we've told groups that we weren't funding them because their friendship didn't seem strong enough to withstand a startup. You'd be surprised some of the meltdowns we've seen in interviews.

My co-founder and I have been working for almost 1.5 years on our startup. We have gone through so many iterations, we can see into each others minds. When an issue comes up, I know exactly what he is thinking and vis-versa. This ability is invaluable during negotiations, meetings, etc.

I don't think of us being on a friendship level, but its something greater. Its been said, its almost like your married to your co-founder - an analogy which is pretty much true. Your futures are tied together.

I wish PG would write something definitive about this.

The people he talks about have often known one another for years. So if you find someone now that you do not know, and have never worked with, it will take you several years, at best to develop a more "long term" relationship. That's great if you're planning on applying to YC in a few years, but comes across in some ways as "trying to find a warm body" if you're applying now.

Granted, there are some people who get married after a few weeks of dating, and of those, it does work out for some of them, but it's a relatively small percentage.

I feel like that would be somewhat counter-productive for YC.

They're looking for people who are going to be Flexible and Determined to make the startup happen, regardless of what obstacles get thrown in the way. Finding a co-founder is one of the first real obstacles, and will definitely not be the hardest one over the life of the startup. By exemplifying the qualities listed in this essay, a single founder should be able to find at least one solid co-founder.

Second, once there, there are tons of events like you describe! E.g., http://founderdating.com/

If you can't move to the SF Bay area then the next best thing to do is star throwing startup events and invite all the startup people you know (and tell them to do the same).

If there's no network you have to build it. Cisco had to exist before Facebook could, so to speak.

I'm not aware of any examples of successful cofounders who hadn't previously worked together.

What about your current colleagues? Long lost friends from university? Neighbors?

I know how you feel, but if that empirically produces a lower probability of success then what can you do?

PG has a different perspective. He's less concerned with questions which assume a company has succeeded; he's more concerned with questions about whether or not a company will succeed. So PG's perspective is more "A company is more likely to succeed with multiple founders."

My point: the two perspectives seem mutually exclusive, but they may not be.

Also, partners in a partnership are not shielded from liability (i.e., for lawsuits, business debts, etc.) like investors in LLCs or corporations are.

Friendship can help, but at the end of the data, a business is about money. Do you know enough about your friend's financial wherewithal to be comfortable launching a business with him/her?

I agree. One of the best assets for a good founder with tech-skills is a business/marketing founder. She can keep the ball rolling on the business things that would halt or slow software development, and during development she can be out discussing the product with potential customers. Once a MVP has been developed, she obviously becomes the sales and marketing manager.

> Finding a co-founder is hard, though.

Are you single? Notice that I said "she" above? Consider joining a dating site and trying to meet some cool women who have business or marketing backgrounds (obviously women that you would like to date as well). I've only been on OKCupid for a month, and I've already met a couple really cool, driven women who would be an amazing asset to a startup.

I'm not saying to jump straight into a relationship just so that you can start your startup. My intent was simply to point out one way of meeting a potential cofounder, a way you probably never considered. There are countless other "hacks" that can be employed for meeting cofounders; you just have to put yourself into situations where you're likely to meet the kind of people you'd like to meet. It's really that easy.

While there are numerous companies doing variants of most ideas out there, more often than not it is the one with the most market visibility who ultimately gains traction, even if that product is less impressive than the competition.

As in the OP, it's really a recipe of traits that make a startup successful.

The highway navigational signs in LA are notoriously confusing, especially this one sign in particular which didn't make sufficiently obvious an exit onto I-5. So some local took note of the sign and started to work. He found out exactly what paint colors to use, cut some sheet metal the right way, and made a North I-5 shield. Then he made himself a counterfeit Caltrans (California highway department) uniform, went to the sign, and altered it with the counterfeit shield to point out the exit. (He even made the shield dirty, to make it seem like it had been there for some time rather than being newly installed.)

It was nine months before the highway department even noticed--and when they did, they didn't even change it back. It stayed up for years until the sign was completely replaced--complete with this guy's alteration.

I don't know if that qualifies as hacking a system to one's advantage, or even as a hack, but I think it gets at the underlying personality trait.

Links:

http://www.good.is/post/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-...

http://www.ankrom.org/freeway_signs.html

I also did a second thing. When I loaned what little programming power we had to help in the early days of computing, I said, "We are not getting the recognition for our programmers that they deserve. When you publish a paper you will thank that programmer or you aren't getting any more help from me. That programmer is going to be thanked by name; she's worked hard." I waited a couple of years. I then went through a year of BSTJ articles and counted what fraction thanked some programmer. I took it into the boss and said, "That's the central role computing is playing in Bell Labs; if the BSTJ is important, that's how important computing is." He had to give in. You can educate your bosses. It's a hard job. In this talk I'm only viewing from the bottom up; I'm not viewing from the top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.

I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime.

So a year in, I only managed to find 35 hours of work one week, so I called up HR and got that overhead number to put down for those extra 5 hours. Next day, I found myself in a meeting with my boss and his boss, being put on some form of probationary "hourly" status, working part time until I could get my workload back up to speed. I could work as few as 24 hours per week, and I'd only get paid for the hours I worked.

So naturally things picked up and soon I found myself working 50 and 60 hour weeks again, and amazingly, my new "hourly" status meant I was getting paid for all of them. HR sent up the necessary paperwork to get me back onto "Salaried" mode and I told them I'd get it right back to them.

1 month later, they sent that paperwork again, and I apologized for letting it go on so long.

Next month, my boss delivered it by hand and I promised to "get right on it."

Finally, after 180 days of billing 60 hour weeks and getting paid for all of it, I found myself back in that same room with my boss, his boss, and now his boss, all of whom wanting to know why I hadn't filled in that paperwork.

I laid out the math for them. Silence... Then uncontrolled laughter from all hands. Congratulations, son. But how about we fill out that paperwork right now?

At Startup School, there was a line of several hundred people waiting for lunch, which consisted of a dozen or so different kinds of pizza stacked in piles of 7-10 boxes each. We had a group of 3-4 people, looked at the line, and someone said, "This line is ridiculous. How can we hack this system?" Someone suggested going somewhere else on campus to eat, but we wanted to stay and mingle. Someone else in the group knew people farther up in the line, and suggested skipping ahead in the line. Ultimately, I simply squeezed through near the front of the line, grabbed a whole box of pizza, and took it back for our group to share.

This kept our group from further clogging the line and seemed much more efficient than 3-4 of us waiting to select our 1-2 pieces each. Hopefully no hungry Startup School attendees were upset by our line hackery, as we thought it was a pretty win-win hack.

My Dad owns a wholesale fence company and when the fire and police dept wanted to rewrite the fire code for gated neighborhoods they wanted to do something different EDIT: By code, obviously I mean as in LAW, not as in programming, my Dad being a fenceman is obviously not a programmer lol. So they came to my Dad and asked him to help a write a forward thinking code for the city, what they eventually settled on was an RFID card system where every police and fire dept vehicle has a card which constantly emits a signal that opens the gate of any neighborhood which has this reciever (it is mandatory for the two parishes nearest to us). So being young (13) and new to programming at the time (this was almost 10 years ago) I decided to try to reverse engineer one of the cards. I took it apart piece by piece looked at the programming software they were using and eventually (after much tinkering) made my own card.

Obviously this is highly illegal and so I was slightly worried about putting it on there, but I also thought it showed characteristics of curiosity and a will to find a better way... In case you are wondering, yes, i still get into any gated house or subdivision in a two parish radius without hassle :P lol

Sometimes your audience is sympathetic because they perceive that the system you're beating is broken.

I read Victor Kiam's "autohagiography," and in it he recounts a story about how parking at a baseball game was impossible to get, but there was a special lot just for limos. So he grabs a peaked cap, puts on a dark suit, and drives his buddies to the game, right into the limo lot.

That (possibly apocryphal) anecdote is a perfect little story of ingenuity and hacking the system without confessing to moral corruption, more of a right the imbalance and tweak the nose of a big, unlikeable organization kind of thing.

Any system that loves its rules is ripe for this sort of thing. My wife's mother was born in Canada but came over as a child and had to renounce her citizenship at one point. They changed their rules so we were able to get her citizenship re-instated and my wife can be a Canadian citizen too. She's never even been to Canada.

I always get a little thrill out of beating rules people with their rules. These things aren't harmful (generally) to members of the system, though these kinds of loopholes only tend to exist as long as they aren't too greatly used.

Now being a welfare cheat or talking about how much you like shoplifting is probably not a good idea, but doesn't everyone commit a little harmless loophole exploitation from time to time?

EDIT: The general weakness of institutions are rules. Anyone wanted to disrupt such things needs to know how to exploit those weaknesses.

It just requires a certain amount of "ballsiness" in putting yourself out there to try to change something that already exists, and a certain amount of opportunism in recognizing when things can be done differently without violating rules/personal ethics/the law.

It's not by definition an immoral thing to do. e.g. a real-estate broker wants to sell a house as quickly as possible, so they tend to sell houses slightly below market-value and then convince you it's the best you'll get. you can rig this incentive in your favor by telling the broker you've contacted two brokers and will accept the highest bid.

I actually applied this one recently as my sister was looking for a renter and had contacted only 1 broker. I convinced her to get a second opinion and she got a way better offer.

There were tons of threads on that.

http://searchyc.com/single+founder

Not sure what your personality mismatch was, but I would tend to believe it's something you could alter/improve/change if you consciously wanted to.

Of course, if you REALLY can't get over the "sting" of a simple rejection, then you might find that the never-ending stream of "no"'s and doubts you run across in trying to get something off the ground would be more than you were able to deal with.