Ask HN: What are your criteria for selecting cofounders?

1. Emotional Maturity - startups are super stressful, you need someone who can be a steady voice of reason.

2. Relentless - someone who is stubborn and never gives up.

3. Complementary - someone who can fill in the blanks vis-a-vis your skills (tech/business/sales/..)

You don't need a cofounder. You need to learn to program.

Maybe in the same vein you could do it for cofounders? De-risk yourself by picking a cofounder that you know well and will be helpful. It's definitely not perfect but maybe this will help...

If you pick someone that you know well, you'll be a better judge of whether you'll have work conflicts later. I'm not a fan of working on a project together to test your chemistry. It's still a big gamble if you do that. People are too nice.

Your cofounder judgment ability:

- random person

- acquaintance

- previous co-worker

- friend

- family

You could draw up the major roles that you'll need to take on for the early stage part of the startup (UX, sales, engineering, design, marketing, management, fund raising, etc.). When picking a partner try to optimize for filling as many of the roles as possible. It helps if they have a different background but I think proven skills are more important.

Cofounder skill balance:

- they're me and we do all the same stuff

- same skills but different background

- they know some other skills but together there are still many gaps

- together you cover most skill gaps and have different backgrounds

- they know enough of what you don't that together you'll cover all the skill gaps

From the roles you laid out, how much experience do they have with each? Add up the points 1-5 for each job to get an idea of how likely they are to be good at their tasks.

Cofounder job experience:

- never done work like this before

- worked a bit in the industry but not this role

- worked in this role in a different industry

- worked in this role in this industry

- excelled previously working in this industry doing this job (really know the ropes)

Take these three criteria and weight them properly for a clunky formula that sorta helps with cofounder picking, e.g. 5 * chemistry + 3 * skills + (total_experience / # jobs)

non-starters:

- can't do it full time

- squabble over equity or other founding stuff

- don't want to do work (after you agree on tasks)

- talk past each other often/can't work together

I'd second what other people in this thread have said about reading The Founder's Dilemma. It's well worth the time if you haven't read it.

[0] https://codingvc.com/how-to-de-risk-a-startup/

I have good friends who I love to spend time with, but I never want to work with them.

I had colleagues in other teams I loved to work with, who I never wanted to have in my team (e.g. development vs operations. Really cool for problem solving and interacting on a project basis, but too different in daily habits).

I had colleagues in my team I loved to work with daily, who I never want to start a company with.

Even when you already know a lot about people that doesn't mean they'd be a good fit for a cofounder. But then I've never started a startup, I'm happily employed and don't plan on going back to be my own boss.