The real world is messy. There are many reasons why a suitable cofounder might be found through a matching service, or a life partner, or even just a fun date.
YCombinator was founded in part on the notion that there existed quality technical founders that were being excluded from traditional venture capital networks.
It's always ' I want Multi billion dollar company X combined with multi billion dollar company Z. Build this for me in exchange for 2.5% equity vested over 5 years.'
Then if you do waste a weekend on a POC you'll hear it doesn't match their vision. You don't even get a thank you from these jerks.
TBH I've given up on starting a tech company completely, I work a 9-5 and then make small games afterwards.
Those are the generous ones.
If you're a tech person and you 'join as employee #1' then you have just decreased your chances for a reasonable payday by about 90%. So make sure that salary is a substantial one, or negotiate for double digits stock. Otherwise: better to be a founder. Same risks, more control, better payday if it works out.
It's just equity in whatever far off pipedream they have.
Every time I've been given an annoying "you do all the work" offer like this I've entertained the thought. I'm surprised you don't hear about it happening more often to be honest.
The only ideas I considered stealing were ideas I had previously (or close to that).
There is an upside, you can talk about your idea freely, chances of theft are low.
Assuming it's a man and woman, and average experiences the guy likely went through 100s-1000s of profiles to match with her, and she likely in the high 10s to low 100s.
The reason you disagree FWIW is that you believes 'snapped up quickly' means near-instantaneous, whereas they see it as more of 'with the right strategy you can be the snapper'
It's a network problem; this is where you start but not necessarily end.
"for some reason, a lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than hiring. Don't do this! This is one of the most important decisions you make in the life of your startup and you need to treat it as such.
And for some reason, students are really bad at this. They just pick someone. They're like, I want to start a business and you want to start a business, let's start a startup together. There are these cofounder dating things where you're like, Hey I'm looking for a cofounder, we don't really know each other, let's start a company. And this is like, crazy. You would never hire someone like this and yet people are willing to choose their business partners this way. It's really really bad. And choosing a random random cofounder, or choosing someone you don't have a long history with, choosing someone you're not friends with, so when things are really going wrong, you have this sort of past history to bind you together, usually ends up in disaster.
We had one YC batch in which nine out of about seventy-five companies added on a new cofounder between when we interviewed the companies and when they started, and all nine of those teams fell apart within the next year. The track record for companies where the cofounders don't know each other is really bad."
With that said, I did notice that Tinder in the US is just utter garbage, even with my strategy. The best places so far have all been in Europe (only tested the US a bit and some European countries).
Interesting that you just called about 40% of the <50yrs old population "lemons"
But dating and cofounding isn’t. People with nothing wrong with them break up, become single, appear on dating sites.
People who are great cofounders may decide to work in great jobs first.