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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

I am looking for a co-founder(s) for my innovative start-up in the online tickets sector.

No you're not. If you're looking for people to work on your startup, you're looking for employees.

Co-founders are people who co-found a company with you. Co-founders help decide the early direction of a company. Co-founders are owners of a company.

You've already decided what sector the company is going to be operating in ("online tickets"), what the company is going to be called ("ticketfeed"), something about how the company is going to operate (if you haven't, what justification do you have for calling it "innovative"?), and you've fallen into the bad-CEO trap of calling it "your" company.

If you really want co-founders, you probably meant to write something along the lines of "I am looking for co-founders, ideally people interested in online tickets because I have some ideas for that sector."

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I disagree. A lot of it is semantics, but I consider co-founders the crew that comes on board and takes a risk with you from a pretty early phase. If we take anyone new on our team in the next couple of months, they'll be co-founders, with shares and all that jazz. When my co-founder came on, I'd already started hashing through the idea and asked if he wanted to take on some of the business elements of it.

I think most ideas originate with one person, then they pitch it to their circle of contacts and then once things get underway, the idea starts growing around the abilities and ideas of those persons. I'd again say that there's not enough, rather than too much info here.

Might it be cynical to think that calling someone a co-founder after the event is a way of getting them to work for nothing? Of course if the idea is a good one and the share allocation to the new recruits is substantial then maybe...

You can pay someone nothing and give them more stock than the founders have, and it won't make them a co-founder. :-)

Conversely, you can pay someone a salary and give them less stock than they should really have as a cofounder, and they might still be a cofounder.

As you said, it's to do with the impact that the person has on the business from inception onwards.

So what do you call someone who joins a company before any salaried employees and has equity comparable to that of the founders?

If they don't have any input into the direction the company takes, I'd say that "fools" is a reasonable thing to call them.

Isn't that a separate issue? You can be part of a company from day one and not have any input into its direction, and maybe sometimes you can join late and have significant influence on future decisions.

Would you still be throwing a fit if he had just typed "an" instead of "my"?

As far as I can tell, all he has is the URL ticketfeed.com. Nothing says the company has been established yet, and I think this would still count as "early". I would imagine he is offering equity.

So he is guilty of calling his idea "innovative" and using "my" in reference to his startup.

No, I am simply looking for people looking to join my startup i.e the startup I represent.

so, employees

Or partners. Partners don't need to be co-founders, but can have the same control and say.

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