* Go back to school and learn a new programming language.
* Collaborate in open source projects.
* Go to startup conventions.
* Other.
a) Experience in startups
b) Contacts with all sorts of startuppy people
c) Money
d) Stock, which could be worth a lot someday, if it pans out
e) Freedom and a bunch of contacts of good people recently out of work, if it doesn't.
Also, there are a few non-startup startuppy places. Google and Mozilla rank pretty highly up there. I hear Amazon is pretty good too, though the location isn't as good.
"Startup" conventions are pretty low on intellectual content. Startup School is the only one I'd go to. On the other hand, tech conventions are pretty good: Foocamp/barcamp/superhappydevhouse/pycon/ruby meetups are pretty good. Also, there are a lot of startuppy people in the bay area javascript meetups, if you're in the area. http://javascript.meetup.com/4/
Finally, contests in programming (ICFP, SPOJ, ACM, Topcoder) and math (contest in math modeling, the Putnam), and engineering (DARPA grand challenge, the solar car project, robotics contests) are a good place to find smart, project oriented people with a lot of technical depth, drive, and follow through, though you will often have to sell them on the idea of starting a company.
Good luck!
Plan B: Moved to SF, worked at a trendy startup. Real Hackers met: are you kidding? I pass 12 of them on the bus every day.
Although I will not dispute the SF(San Fran) comment, I hope to see South Florida become "the other SF".
I'd say South Florida is one of the top 10-12 places in the world in terms of number of startups at least according to: http://www.startupwarrior.com/
What do people think of this:
As a side note, other than the lack of members, what makes your site stand apart from hacker news and proggit?
The lack of members is the biggest feature. The odds of it turning into the next Reddit/Digg are much lower than the odds of that happening here. :)
Seriously, the idea stemmed from the YC meetup last week. PG said that the YC interviews aren't like interviews at all, they just "Do YC". If the team and YC seem to click, then they get accepted. I think the same thing applies for finding good cofounders--you just start something and see if the chemistry among the team clicks. I've started projects with friends and complete strangers before, and whether or not I knew them before the project isn't correlated with how well we worked together. There are a few people I met the day of starting a joint project who I'd love to start another company with.
That's what I hope this site could do: not just bring hackers together to discuss startups, but bring them together to launch things and find new cofounders.
I think there are a lot of people on HN that would be great to work with, and the best way to find them would be to just start projects. I currently am lucky enough to have a few hours free each day, but unlucky that I'm far from the Valley(I've got family commitments that have been keeping me in Southern MA all summer). When I get to the valley, I think it will be easier to find co-founders, but until then it's not that easy.
Linux.... 16 year old Finnish kid with nothing to do during those long cold finnish winters.
MySql.... bunch of swedes with the same problem.
PHP... a few hackers with credentials I'm not familiar with but I don't think they came from academia....
Ruby... Japanese kid obsessed with unix and C.
Rails... Danish kid going to a business school in denmark and hacking on the side......
True, the code that runs the internet was written by a bunch of UC Berkley grad students but that was back in the days when you had to be tied to some kind of entity like that in order to have access to the hardware that was needed to run your code. Since the mid 90s this hardware has been very cheap and available to anyone with the passion to purchase and develop.
Many have and they have left traditional venues for new and creative functionality in the dust.
Beyond which, I have only one response to the "look at all the things made by people who aren't professors". Well, look at how many people who can program who aren't professors. Think of all the projects that grew from BSD. Think about Latex.
Have your idea fleshed out and know it inside out. Theres a lot at stake when you bring on a co-founder you only met recently. If the person is sincerely interested and is asking the right questions then you can give it a shot... just make sure it's a necessity before deciding to find someone.
I was in a similar situation earlier this year. From my experience starting a business with a close friend, that knowing and trusting a person is only half the battle. They have to have the skills necessary for the start-up. Just knowing a programming language or being a good speaker may not be good enough. Some people aren't cut out to be founders.
Recently I decided that I would rather raise capital and hire a developer with a nice stock option, mainly because I have a technical and business background. Although co-founders are still a great asset.
We tend to be a socially awkward bunch, so it can be intimidating to approach someone who seems like they've got their shit together. Just send an email and tell them you want to know them. What's the worst that can happen, they say no?
Building a good nerdery is key.
Join this group: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/
Work for a company that has a lot of hackers. (Google and Yahoo are both very good choices.) You want quantity.
Don't go back to school, it's a waste of time and money.
If you look in Meetup.com, there's dozens of meetups that happen for different technologies, entrepreneurship groups, startup groups, etc... It's actually hard to avoid programmers in this town.
Isaac's right. Get a job at Yahoo/Google/Facebook/YC Startup and work for a year or two, make friends, save up some money and then make the leap with your new friends into the startup world. At least that's what a lot of other people are doing around here.
Semi off-topic, but if you're in school to learn programming languages you're doing it wrong...
Physical location isn't necessarily important. I got into my first open source project remotely and that work actually led to a bunch of other jobs that got me pretty much smack dab into the SanFran startup scene.
The key to getting other people to work with you is to wear your passion for a project on your sleeves. People of a like mind will be drawn to that.
P.S. Why would you have to go back to school to learn a new programming language?
Learning a new language would be the excuse, and meeting new hackers in school the goal.
Enjoy!I'm always trying to meet more hackers in my area which is Denver.
In LA. Moving to San Fran in January.