Are you looking for a talented co-founder? I am too Let's meet. | Hacker News Reader

Are you looking for a talented co-founder? I am too Let's meet.

33 pointssomid310 comments

Hi everyone,

I am looking for other entrepreneurs around the South Bay (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Jose, etc...) to partner up with, work together, and launch something amazing.

A bit about me:

I'm a UC Berkeley engineer, have an MBA from MIT. The first startup I joined, as the first engineer, raised over $50M in funding and is doing quite well. I am well versed in Java and a plethora of other languages, scalable systems, AWS, web-stuff (www.lostland.com is my blog)... etc etc.

Currently I work as a senior staff engineer at one of Samsung's Innovation labs focusing on all sort of incredible crazy thingies I can't write about. I have many friends who are also entrepreneurs but they are already working on something and their teams are set... hence this message.

I have a few ideas but I am not married to any of them. I am basically looking for other smart people who'd like to ideate and jump into any space we all find suitable for growth -- it could be wearables, bluetooth beacons, hardware, or a plain old new web application that solves X, Y, Z.

So, if you're interested drop me a line at somid3@gmail.com, I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee or a beer and go from there.

Instead of looking online, I will suggest going to meetups and other gathering places relevant to your interest areas and finding someone you click with.

Chemistry is much more important in a founding team and you are not likely to find that out if you meet someone for express purpose of starting a project together.

Finding founders is like "dating" and not like "interview". Don't be afraid to go it alone until you find someone to team up with.

For those of you in other cities who might be interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7430082

maybe "solve your own problem" and build a service to match people wanting to do things with other skilled people :)

could set baseline requirements like have to have attended one of x schools and have to enter url to live project etc

all the best finding a co-founder! :)

Email sent. Looking forward to the conversation! -Pablo

lots of votes, but no emails yet...

I up-voted your submission not because I'm looking for a co-founder but because you are doing the right thing. As a single founder, I've learned the hard way, that the smarter you are, worst off you are. It's a little too late for me, as my technology is pretty much at the stage where I can look to sell off the IP or look for VC money. But for those that are just starting:

* DO NOT START A COMPANY BY YOURSELF *

I always thought it was BS and stupid that PG would put so much emphasis on looking for co-founders, but I've learned the hard way, that he's not saying this because he's biased but it's because he has experience. Starting a business is hard and I've found the more talented you are, the worst off you'll be. If you are capable of doing everything, you'll try to do everything and it's just going to spread you too thin.

If I had to do it over again, I would start a company with 2 other co-founders, where each co-founder had one or more of the following skills:

- Very good programming skills

- Very good ux/design skills

- Very good marketing/business skills

Knowing what I know now, I should have spent at least a year looking for a co-founder and stayed at my cushy 6 figure job. And only start my company when I found somebody that could function close at or above my level.

I figure there are a lot of people on HN that have above average skills/intelligence and the worst mistake they can make is believing they can do it on their own. You can certainly succeed on your own, but it's going to take a VERY heavy toll.

And I up voted YOUR post because, as a Canadian living and working in New Zealand, there is nothing worse than having a million great ideas and nobody to work on them with. I am flooded with business concepts almost once a week, I love reading them and understanding the problems they can solve.

It seems like you have to live in Silicon Valley, or some Californian suburb, to even attempt to answer these types of requests. I love UX design and development, I'm working on some insanely cool stuff involving automation and industrial wireless, but the audience around here don't even know what they want, let alone wanting to spend a pretty penny on something they haven't had 10 years to "prove it works".

+1 for anyone living on the other side of the railroad tracks. Train for the hardest situations, so when the real ones pop up you can manage them with confidence.

Unfortunately some of us are in other cities. :(

yeah :(

indeed :(

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