Find someone else passionate about your problem. You can't just find someone who has the skill, you need skill + domain. This is hard but not impossible if you look within your community.
Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#12A good read for those interested in this topic i.e. the pros and cons of finding a co-worker through something like "founder dating" VS. with friends/relatives VS. with coworkers is "The Founder's Dilemmas"[1] by Noah Wasserman.
If you'd just like a preview/synopsis of the book, there's a podcast[2] of the author's talk at Stanford, which covers all the broad strokes and key points.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Founders-Dilemmas-Anticipating-Ent...
[2] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3024
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#13Yeah... I've been on most founder match sites, including 2 of 3 OP mentioned (FounderDating and CoFoundersLab) and found them to be useless. I'm a generalist (business/techy/industrial design). They are inevitably full of people already working on something (thus not available to team up) and some consultants looking for clients. The possibility of encountering the triple coincidence of a free agent with the complementary skills you need, and an interest in your startup's particular space and stage is almost zero.
I'd suggest:
* Attend action focused events like hackathons or startup wknd where you can get at least a little sense of how potential partners work.
* Minimize attendance at tech socials: they're mostly loud, biz-card waving, wastes of time, that get you no closer to getting a partner.
* Buy time at a big coworking space for a few months, where you can have meaningful 1-to-1 interactions with a large cross-section of people over time. A big space will include many people open to teaming up. Some founders I know met this way.
* You can start as a solo founder and if you're active about promotion (eg pitching/demoing at events), then you might stumble into someone who is free and interested in your particular space. When you do, attend a hackathon or work on long project together to test for fit.
* Maintain motivation - hard and the only thing that enables you to keep cycling through the possibilities.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#14I have a great co-founder dating story. My advise is to know exactly what you are looking for and then recruit for that dream candidate. I built out my business, boot strapped my startup for 6 months and had a strong idea of my product vision. As I hadn't been particularly happy with my engineering team prior- i decided to start fresh with the perfect technical cofounder to build our product. I spoke to a lot of people about what they envisioned for the technical cofounder role for my product and then made a 'dream resume' of that candidate along with the personality traits that would be the ying to my yang. Once I had a good idea of what I was looking for- I went through every single software engineer connection on linkedin to see if anyone might be a match. A woman who had moved into my old room when I moved out of my house had the exact background for what I was looking for (product driven creative software engineer). I got her involved in our market research study and then asked her for drinks under the premise that she had the exact resume and personality of what I was looking for in a technical cofounder-so what would I need to do in order to find a woman like her and get her to start this company with me. She really loved my idea and more importantly, saw the opportunity for herself to build a really cool product from scratch. We are both in similar places in our career and she 180% had the drive and intelligence to start a company and build our product and technology. She said during the meeting that she was actually interested and wanted to meet the rest of the team. We spent two months working together, getting to know each other and really thinking through the product. She met with all of my advisors and poured through our research. We had discussions about communications, got into our first tiff and had multiple discussions about timeline and career goals before sealing the deal. We share many passions like art, music and most importantly, helping women with their careers. Now that she is my technical cofounder, so many amazing things have happened. She's very talented and has the type of personality that attracts good tech & design talent. We work well together because we spent time communicating what we would both need to make this work for us. So figure out what you need, design that dream candidate, go find her or him and take the time to 'date' them till you are both comfortable moving forward. My relationship with her is now the most important one in my life right now and our attention to communicating is what has propelled our product development and our team's growth.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#15I attended many of these events. IMHO, these events are practically useless like what mighter said.
I am a business founder with slight knowledge about tech. Being a business founder, like mighter said again, it's hard to sell the idea to tech founder unless you prove yourself. Rather than wait for the right person to come, I decided that I bootstrap myself and launched the site.
I am still looking for that one CTO because I want to apply for incubator (ycomb, techstarts, 500 startups), but now having a fully 100% working site and some early traction, I hope I am able to attract a more credible CTO or other type founders.
If anyone here (CTO, CMO, etc) is interested to find out more, please email me at (there are 9 6's in the email)
guest666666666@gmail.com
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#16I built/launched one of those co-founder networks a few months ago (itchwork.com) and I ended up completely abandoning the project, in favor of Angellist (angel.co). They're killing it in this space, and they are the only platform I've personally had success on.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#17Its real tough to be a solo founder and you need somebody with different skill sets to augment your own and to keep you on track.
The various founder dating sites and events are a means to an end. A lot of it depends on your pitch and idea but it's good practice and networking never hurts.
I met one of my cofounders on Angellist.com and the other on CoFounderslab.com.
I had a decent wireframe of the site and how the database and interactions would work but the other cofounders helped to elevate the rough idea.
RoomPoll.com would not be possible without my cofounders.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone found a good co-founder using “founder dating” techniques?
#18I've been on CoFounders Lab and Founder Dating and there are some quality people on the sites but nothing meaningful ever materialized. Had some Skype chats with a few people but it's always "let's keep our options open and keep in touch," which obviously we all know means nothing will ever come of it. I haven't found alot of people who are serious and committed to building something. It seems like alot of people "exploring" building a startup on the side, or it's something they're considering in the future. I haven't spent much time on Angel List so I'm curious to see how that is.
I'm a Non-Technical co-founder and it's a little annoying when technical founders think and act like people like myself can't bring alot to the table, when we've had previous successful companies before.