Ask HN: Where did you find your cofounder?
Did you know your cofounders prior to getting together to start a company? If not, where did you look? How would you have done it differently in hindsight?
Finding a cofounder is like love: it often happens when you're not looking for it. The best thing you can do to improve your odds is continue to improve yourself and put yourself out there.
We both happened to leave our prior place of employment one month apart, then two months later met up again and started working on our current company.
I wouldn’t do anything different in hindsight. There are so many challenges in starting a company, who you start it with should be as de-risked as possible. Even with a long working relationship, we constantly have to work on our way of working to make sure we’re balancing one another properly. Had we not come into this company with significant prebuilt trust, things could have gone off the rails at multiple points along the way.
Hope that’s helpful!
So, as an example, people become consultants, which is in essence a “small business”, and they don’t necessarily need a co founder to be successful. They may have trusted people they turn to for assistance, but generally speaking it’s a solo endeavor.
A few months ago I spun up a “side project” that is a free mentoring service for managers (link is in my profile if that’s helpful for you!). It takes up about five hours a week, I do light promotion for it on social media and HN, but my total time commitment is fairly capped. I’m not constantly iterating on potential product angles, or spinning up different business units. It’s just me, being a good neighbor to fellow managers.
Conversely, my “day job” is really complicated. It’s services and software, in a field I’m not professionally trained in (organizational development). We do B2B deals, sign multi year agreements, have to do cold outreach, spend months trying to win deals, and we’re constantly experimenting with ways to unlock revenue. If I had to own all of that, plus own the product, I’d be overwhelmed and ineffective.
So, I take the product. He (my business partner) takes everything else. It allows us to carve out day to day responsibility and move forward effectively. If I had to hire for his role, I’d be searching for a unicorn. If he had to hire for my role, he’d have gotten really half assed results.
For even more complex startups, I can understand why there are three or more founders. Everyone should bring something special to the table, and own a huge component of work that is critical to long term success. So, that could be a marketing wizard, an engineer, and a business developer for some cool consumer product.
Hope that helps!
I was a low experience dev and I had a relationship with a girl. She had this best friend which I've never seen, maybe for gelousy at that time, until that day, we met, he was totally the opposite from the man of that I thought, he was nice instead, and asked acute question, he was really really smart, so we started to go out all together in weekends, get known each other, that was the begin of a long friendship. Few months later that day he proposed me (Americans might get confuse) this business idea aimed to solve our specific problem as students and I felt in love with it so we started to work on the project together.
I feel lucky because I've never felt this synergy on building something with anyone, tackling problems on every aspects (from Tech to Legal to Design to Marketing and so on) with such positive energy and "openmindness" to handle problems and even pivot if needed. This is one of the ideal aspects of any cofounder, Luca thinks (and I freaking agree) that cofounders relationship has to be genuine as old-friends relationships balanced by a spontaneous mindset to obsessively stay up-to-date with every movement just like having a wife that stresses you on chat like "Where you at?" but that's because she loves you, we instead love the idea which the company puts its values on.
What is your story?