VentureHacks: How to Pick a Co-founder | Hacker News Reader

VentureHacks: How to Pick a Co-founder

venturehacks.com

51 pointschristonog17 comments

The primary problem of finding cofounders isn't seeding out the bad ones, it's even knowing someone you might want to found a company with.

According to the post your cofounder should be someone of roughly the same age and financial standing that you have a history with, have aligned motives with, has incredibly intelligence, energy and integrity. Oh, and it has to be someone that respects you and that you respect as well.

Personally I don't know anyone that lives up to all of these criteria, and I doubt that most people do.

I know that finding the above is something very hard. I was lucky enough to find just such a person a while ago by chance. We hit it off pretty well even though I am a product/systems guy and he is a programmer. I actually decided not to apply to this years YC because I am waiting for him to finish his masters in cs and I would rather try it next summer with him than find someone else I trusted less. We even have a third person that we both feel the same about as well and want him in it with us too.

Might sound a bit cliche, but I pretty much know that we can put together the right team in short order. It is a different feeling when you just KNOW the people have your back.

Be open to it and network, you never know. I was not actively looking and it just happened.

FYI, this issue probably has personal relevance for the author (Naval Ravikant). He was one of four founders who were left out in the cold during the Epinions IPO.

The fifth got $20 million.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E5D7113DF...

But the founders of Epinions -- Nirav Tolia, Naval Ravikant, Ramanathan Guha, Dion Lim and Mike Speiser -- have learned that success does not necessarily mean that a company's creators will be rewarded.

August Capital and Benchmark Capital, two venture capital firms that invested $4 million each to help start Epinions in April 1999, profited handsomely in the public offering. They had both made additional investments, and each now owns a stake in Shopping.com worth roughly $60 million. Overall, Shopping.com was worth $750 million at the close of the market on Friday.

By contrast, four of the five founders of Epinions did not see a dime from Shopping.com's public sale -- their shares in Epinions were rendered worthless when it merged with DealTime.

''What the Epinions story demonstrates,'' said Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley research group, ''is that the golden rule applies even in Silicon Valley: the people who have the gold, rule.''

Of the Epinions founders, only Mr. Tolia, who took over as Shopping.com's chief operating officer after the merger, fared well in the offering. His shares were worth nearly $20 million at Friday's closing price.

My favorite from the post:

"Partner with someone who is a rational believer that nice guys finish first"

Mark Zuckerberg wasn't the only founder. There were several for Facebook.

Not to mention Apple had 3 co-founders, not 2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne

"One builds, one sells", the organisations which I started that worked had this at the start, or they started working well once they had it.

One difficulty is that qualified co-founders are probably already looking for _their_ idea's co-founder :) Quoting a @venturehacks idea for solving this: get them to work part-time on your startup until you win them over!

One afternoon, Nasruddin and his friend were sitting in a cafe, drinking tea, and talking about life and love.

"How come you never got married, Nasruddin?" asked his friend at one point.

"Well," said Nasruddin, "to tell you the truth, I spent my youth looking for the perfect woman. In Cairo, I met a beautiful and intelligent woman, with eyes like dark olives, but she was unkind. Then in Baghdad, I met a woman who was a wonderful and generous soul, but we had no interests in common. One woman after another would seem just right, but there would aways be something missing. Then one day, I met her. She was beautiful, intelligent, generous and kind. We had everything in common. In fact she was perfect."

"Well," said Nasruddin's friend, "what happened? Why didn't you marry her?"

Nasruddin sipped his tea reflectively. "Well," he replied, "it's a sad thing. Seems she was looking for the perfect man."

From http://www.sysindia.com/emagazine/mulla/mulla.html

What's the lesson here? :) (you should work on theirs too?)

Technical founders who don’t sell also use bad proxies (”Harvard MBA!”)

So, what's a better proxy for figuring out who a good business/sales co-founder is? (I ask as a tech guy with a Harvard MBA co-founder ;-))

There's a huge difference between biz dev and sales. Most MBAs are "above" sales. If you need business/strategic/distribution partners, MBAs are great. If you need someone cold calling and knocking on doors, find a frat boy or sorority chick. (I'm serious - it's what every drug company, liquor distributor, and whoever else does.)

I vaguely remember in Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book that one of the best predictors of success in a business role on grads coming out of big name schools going to Wall Street was whether they were an athlete or not. That seems to jive decently with the "frat boy" suggestion.

Makes sense really, pick team players with a drive to win.

I wish I could up-vote this comment twice. So true.

Thanks for posting...

I will definitely need to follow some of these guidelines in order to find a co-founder, and I mean QUICKLY.

Excellent post!

If you are in the bay area, the co-founders meetup next week might help you http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/

Excellent post. Also clearly explains why 2 is the ideal number, and why you need history with your co-founder.

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