How do TechStars & YC teams find co-founders? | Hacker News Reader

How do TechStars & YC teams find co-founders?

blog.cofounderslab.com

12 pointsdglidden4 comments

Ban this link. The author ("CoFoundersLab") spammed their entire mailing list to beg for upvotes... twice.

From one email:

"Tomorrow morning, we'll be listing the article on Hacker News, Y Combinator's social news network about startups. We need your help to upvote the article to the top of the list so it gets noticed by other entrepreneurs. The more upvotes the article receives, the more this valuable research gets shared with the entrepreneur community."

Doesn't this imply that 76%+ of all co-founder meetings are either people you already know or one-step removed? How does this support the Cofounder's Lab business if only 12% of co-founders meet through external events or "founder's dating sites"?

I love the idea and concept of Cofounder's Lab, don't get me wrong, but doesn't the research here support more the fact that it's probably people you already know versus those you don't?

@rexreed Yes that's true that's how founders have been finding each other historically. Keep in mind that many in the survey were pre-CoundersLab. We're not into putting out research as a marketing tool, we're doing research to help entrepreneurs understand their world, trends, get informed and be successful. I think this piece is a testament to our culture of being true, not just pushing our agenda.

Back to your point though, I suspect (and am betting my business on the fact) that when we do this same survey in 3 or 5 years from now you'll start to see CoFoudnersLab show up on the chart; we are too new, and it takes time for teams to come together and launch startups.

I agree, but CoFounder's Lab is not the only opportunity for such online and event-driven meetups for cofounder dating. In fact, I've been to numerous co-founder dating type events as well as websites that attempt to do cofounder matching. Those have been around for well over a decade... you'd expect to see some influence there with those events in the data. Unless you're doing something radically different that will shift it away from friends / family / coworkers / colleagues, I'd expect the ratios to stay about the same.

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