Ask HN: How did you find your cofounder? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you find your cofounder?

As a technical person ... i find it increasingly difficult to find a suitable, reliable cofounder to work on one of my ideas, or one of theirs.

If you can please explain how you met your cofounder? Were you out looking for one, or was it a thought in the back of your head? Explain.

Thanks

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And what for a +40 someone? Can't go and waste time at school again.

I got contacted by my cofounder. Back when Rails was hot, he looked on forums, found some posts of mine, investigated further and contacted me.

Didn't work out though. Project got started, has been making profit for years, but not enough to drop the daytime job.

I find that reliable people my age really have such an outdated view on business that I know in advance we're not compatible... younger people lack experience.

I'm thinking lately of switching roles. I had been looking for a non-tech cofounder, as I've got more than enough coding/sysadmin experience. But the last 7-8 years, I'm the director of a small business (not my own), learning marketing, pr, bizdev, hr, ... so I'm thinking I might rather look for someone to handle the tech part.

I've been involved with three startups, and met all three co-founders under radically different situations. The first startup was a game studio, Blazing Griffin (http://blazinggriffin.com) -- I was doing hobbyist iOS game dev as a creative outlet during my PhD, and demoed one of my prototypes to a guy who I ended up starting the studio with at a regular gamedev drinkup (https://twitter.com/GameDevEd). We eventually parted ways (difference of vision), but I wouldn't say we were unsuccessful as a co-founding team, since the company is still doing great and we parted under good terms.

The second was a mini-publishing house (a very strange and very different business...), which I co-founded with a group of university friends. We had a couple of common interests, and all had ideas for different projects that could overlap. These were folks I originally met socially, mostly through a dance class we all took, but we've had a great time working together and shipped some pretty excellent things. It may be because we were friends first and co-founders later, but our working relationship has been consistently really great.

The third startup is different again. It's not launched yet, but I'm building it with a three-person team of folks I put together from my day job. We're all a little disillusioned with corporate work, and realised over a couple conversations that we we had the technical and business development chops to put together something really awesome, if only it was something that we had real ownership of. Hey presto, a team of founders was formed and off we went in search of ideas (our current prototype is a no-nonsense classified listings site for apps; read about it at http://blog.theappclassifieds.com).

I'm not sure what the takeaway from all of this might be, other than to just consistently surround yourself with smart people. Find a place where people are smarted than you and interested in building the same kinds of things, and get going.

My cofounder is my former manager. We worked together for 6 years before leaving and chasing the common dream we had of starting our own business.

I made friends at school but very few of them would I consider doing business with, much less starting a business with. I suppose it depends on how you select your friends.

I met my co-founders at school, after 11 years I finally figured out it did not work and that it never would work, been a single founder for the last 6 years and is never going to have a co-founder again.

Remember some people work better as single founders.

Ps. I have employees and always will, I loce being around people at work.

I had great co-founders and bad co-founders. The great ones are people I knew, whom I respected. I told them my idea. They got excited about it. We discussed it more and more, until it was clear we were all passionate about it. And we did it.

I wrote my lessons here: http://foundrs.com/find-a-cofounder

There is a PG paper explaining that the best place is at school.

I think the PG essay you're referring to is http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html, which includes literally the single line "the best way to meet co-founders is to go to school with them." While this is almost certainly true, it isn't exactly actionable advice -- either the OP is still in university, in which case she's already looking amongst her classmates, or she's graduated, in which case it's too late.

Although going back to do a postgraduate degree and intentionally looking out for co-founders is a perfectly valid tactic, so I guess there is something actionable about it.

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