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> The #1 skill I am always hoping to find someone with that I vibe with is design. No matter what you build, both UX design and a consistent visual aesthetic are very important

Is it surprising? Design is cheap, and outsourced. You can go very far with a single contractor designer picked up from dribbble.com (think ~1-5k USD max for the entire MVP and marketing site). The quality is excellent and will last you well into later funding rounds.

Another thing to consider is products that differentiate on UX are much harder to launch. And when they do, it's more engineering than design that ensures it succeeds. I think about SnapChat. It's great to say X would be a great user experience, but boy, good luck finding a skilled iOS dev to make that happen.

By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too. There are some pretty good people out there who aren't that expensive. But there's a bunch of risks with that approach and they are similar to the ones where you outsource design - you will constantly have to re-hire if you need pivots, there might be major friction switching people, and the costs can start to add up. It's not 100% analogous, freelance design is a bit cheaper, it's easier to spot bad designers etc, but I think the analogy somewhat holds.

Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.

> By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too.

The market for developer talent and designer talent are visibly different. Different in terms of supply, compensation (as a factor of supply), and risk (due to the compensation!). Risk here is you mostly take the word of the developer they're competent. We come up with elaborate interview processes for this (if you have an idea for a better process... ). For a designer, a portfolio clearly demonstrates they're competent. This makes outsourcing and freelancing more viable, increasing supply, and driving down the overall costs, in my opinion.

I won't touch on actual skill / investment in becoming a good designer vs. developer except to say I think there's differences there too, at least outside of the tail.

I would circle back to my second point, that even if you have an excellent designer, someone still needs to implement it and not make it janky. I think it explains, as a whole, why people gravitate towards engineering co-founders if they don't have the skillset.

> Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.

I don't think Airbnb won on design or would consider design its moat. Designers can also be excellent leaders and executives.

Fair points, but a note on AirBnB with the caveat that I only know the public information and never worked there. To me, their only moat is their brand and the network effects they built with that brand. The famous stories are them fundraising by selling Obama themed cheerios, and going to apartments helping hosts take better pictures. Neither of those things are the “cranking out iPhone mocks” you’d expect from a freelance designer but seem like stories fundamentally linked to their design backgrounds and ability to tell stories in the visual world. Strong design probably matters more for something like Snapchat than Coinbase so I’m sure it depends. You’re probably right in your explanation for why Eng skills are more in demand but I still suspect you’re understating the impact of a great designer.

In my opinion empathy for users (doubly important in a multi sided marketplace e.g. hosts and guests) helped Airbnb succeed. They no doubt removed friction, and prioritized that internally, and that helped them become an aggregator for their new market but unclear if it was due to being designers that provided this insight.

I think for an early stage startup you need to make tradeoffs. What skills can we get with our founding team's overlap, and what skills can we easily fill? Of course, the person matters so much more than these checkboxes, and I don't think anyone would suggest not working with a designer, but I think it does explain why so many are looking for technical founders.

But I was complaining about the exact opposite- I have a hard time finding potential design cofounders as an engineer, and every hackathon and similar events seems to be filled with engineers , but short on designers even though designers win pitches more than engineers (you can fake implementation for a demo but can’t fake design).

The fact that it’s harder to find designers than engineers for founders despite the opposite dynamic in the job market is what I was saying was surprising.

The platform does not have many designers looking for technical founders. As I said, it’s filled with MBAs. When pressed what skills they would contribute, they say things like “backend finance.” Usually either they have no money but need you to build a complex project before you can think about raising money (raising the question why not just build it and pitch VCs yourself), or they already raised money but want to give you some absurdly low percentage (you’re not really cofounder).

Are there people in there that would be able to raise money /sell the product if you built it? Maybe but others have discussed why that’s the hardest of all skills to vet for.

Either way if the platform was filled with strong designers interested in partnering with technical cofounders I’d be much happier and speak more highly of it.

Why don’t those people just outsource development if they’re so brilliant and business minded?

> By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too.

And there's plenty of successful companies that do this btw.

> But there's a bunch of risks with that approach and they are similar to the ones where you outsource design - you will constantly have to re-hire if you need pivots, there might be major friction switching people, and the costs can start to add up.

This is simply not true. This can happen regardless of wether you outsource your dev team or not.

> Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.

One of the top 50 largest companies in the world was started by an engineer who dropped out of school. What's your point? Correlation != causation.

Outsourcing is such a dirty word here and I don't get it. It's objectively not a bad option, it just has different risks.

> Design is cheap, and outsourced

I think the concept we need here is “taste” - that ability to recognise something is great, and ideally the ability to know what will work and be able to make it happen.

Often you want to have a designer because you are paying them for their taste, and perhaps not so much for their technical skills. Perhaps you personally are the opposite, where you have the taste and ability to spec, and you just want to have someone do what you ask.

There is a stereotype of founders with no taste, who drive the production of hideous products.

A sensible founder that doesn’t have great taste needs a cofounder or employee that does have great taste, and the founder needs to give that person the authority to drive the aesthetic of the product. That role is usually given to a designer - and I suspect that you are misunderstanding what waprin (the person you are replying to) meant.

> I’m surprised so few people care about where there cofounder lives.

If I wanted to find someone in my city, a global website would be the last place I'd look. Maybe the people who use a global matching platform are more interested in finding someone with specific skills / interests rather than someone who lives nearby.

Well even if I want to find someone local, doesn’t mean I can just walk outside and find them, especially since the pandemic shut down most events in the Bay Area. Dating apps seem pretty popular and I think vast majority of people on those platforms are looking for someone local.

It took many years before dating platforms became viable. I remember trying some dating websites early on, and there just weren't any people in my area at all. It was fun looking at the profiles, but it wasn't actually useful for meeting people yet.

I would assume that a cofounder matching platform with 16000 profiles has a similar problem, it's just too few people to bother looking for local matches.

>Maybe the people who use a global matching platform are more interested in finding someone with specific skills / interests rather than someone who lives nearby.

Maybe there's a misunderstanding because there are no obvious screen shots but it says you can filter on location. Thus, a "global" matching platform becomes a local one. It's not is if one is endlessly scrolling 15000 profiles hoping for a local person to appear.

It's still a relative numbers game. Finding a nearby potential co-founder in a subset on a popular website such as YC is more likely than a local website such as lasvegas.craigslist.org

> "people who didn’t have much besides an idea and an MBA"

I've not tried any co-founder dating sites, but this rings hilarious true based on a few conversations I've had in the past. Basically X-airbnb-stripe-froogle-box employees, who were able to raise tens of millions based on an idea, and nothing else, now looking for "co-founders" to whom they are willing to give 1% of equity. Made me lol a little.

> I’m surprised so few people care about where there cofounder lives.

I got the impression that many of the people using these services felt they had already exhausted their local networks and decided to look more broadly.

I also suspect that many of these founders plan to build full-remote companies anyway.

That I said - I agree. I'd want my co-founder to be local if at all possible, even though I've worked remotely for many years. The co-founder relationship is too important.

For me it would be sales and the "business" side of things. And perhaps some domain expertise. I can do design competently enough to make it work (I do most the design work at my current company despite nominally being the lead software engineer).

The problem I have is that I have no idea how one would go about evaluating someones capability at that skillset.

> The problem I have is that I have no idea how one would go about evaluating someones capability at that skillset.

I'm not pretending this is the best way to approach it (I'd approach it very differently, but I have the benefit of already having started my own company), but start with the obvious: ask them what they'd contribute and just let the questions flow naturally from there. If they can't sell themselves to you, they almost certainly can't sell themselves to investors, customers, and future employees.

What other side of a startup is there, besides "business"?

> The problem I have is that I have no idea how one would go about evaluating someones capability at that skillset.

I am a typical engineer type, and the few times I have correctly picked someone was when I was working directly with them - you can then tell real talent from their real world effects, even if it is not your own skill set.

Also one critical attribute when selecting a co-founder is integrity - if you can’t trust them then their other skills don’t matter. Working closely with someone gives you a chance to judge that - it is otherwise very difficult.