Ask HN: Can we brainstorm a better way to find a co-founder?

1. Do put yourself out there. Go to a lot of events, accept invitations, make it known that you're interested in meeting more people (encourage friends to make introductions).

2. Don't let social events fatigue you: get in, get what you want, get out. However, once somebody opens up to you, i.e. invites you for dinner or drinks after an event, you need to switch modes: put in the time, treat them well, even if it compromises other parts of your life. If you're not giving something up, you're not giving anything.

3. Make friends in different cities or countries, then travel and stay with them. They will introduce you to their friends, who may then introduce you to their friends, etc. (Best, of course, if you're invited.)

4. You must actually be worth meeting, so be sure you've already put in the work and thought out a narrative that ties your past accomplishments into a story building toward future success.

5. Be interesting. Read, think, write, have a point of view.

6. Be interested. If you talk too much, you reveal that nobody wants to listen to you. If you show authentic interest in other people, doors magically open.

7. The best "hack" I can think of is to make use of the Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn social graphs. Pay attention to the suggested friends / follow feeds. For people you particularly like, go through who they follow and identify potential friends, allies, collaborators, social gateways, etc. After you have a list of people you might like to meet, you can start to be strategic about framing yourself and putting yourself in the right places to meet (and interest) them.

8. Remember that meeting one person is an opportunity to meet their friends and anyone they think you should know. After you've gotten to know somebody a little bit, it's ok to ask if they know anyone you should meet. Or you may not have to ask: if you get an invite to an event, always accept it – you never know who you might meet.

9. Think in terms of building a social graph. Read a bit about the study of social networks including "social capital", the roles of different nodes in the network, strong ties vs. weak ties, etc.

10. There's no excuse for bad social skills. Learn good manners and be prepared to adapt to new cultural expectations.

Again, as others have emphasized, there's no easy way. High value people are already overwhelmed by demand. As a friend once advised me in regard to dating, "be the flower to the bee."

Not really.

I started-up with a co-worker (of 2 years) and a guy whom I hadn't worked with before and guess who was the first to bring problems to the company and quit? The guy I previously worked with...

Truth is you don't really know a person until you're both in a seriously f*ckd up situation. That's what my experience has taught me.

I would suggest not trying to "find" a cofounder -- the "cofounder" idea of a word is itself a weirdness here, almost mythologized -- you're either there at the beginning or you are not, and if you are, you're a founder. If that person's name wasn't just JUMPING at you when you had a company idea, you don't want one, or need one.

If you did not naturally find an idea with someone, do it yourself. Be the CEO and hire the help you need (and get rid of them if they don't work out), but don't give up control.

This is basically marriage (you'll probably spend more time with them than family at times) -- and you don't marry someone you don't love. You must really really know them. And that takes years, and can end your startup if you choose incorrectly.

If you are trying to get someone to implement your business idea, hire technical help. If you are technical and need business help, hire somebody to be your VP of Sales/Finance/whatever.

But I also don't frequently see this drive to "find a co-founder" outside of discussions tied to YC. For YC, yes, having a co-founding team is a key component. But outside of YC, if you want to start a company, you just do it. Maybe you have other people involved, maybe not. Circumstances vary. Finding a co-founder is an option, and maybe even a good idea, but is not a road-blocking milestone.

Bollocks to that. I was an FX trader who copy/pasted values for excel formula results because I was scared they'd go away if I typed something in another cell.

It took a short while but I taught myself. Programming and technology are rational, a set of facts about the world that are inherently understandable at most levels of abstraction unlike, say, volatility trading on a proprietary basis or private equity.

The cost of being technically incompetent - and by that I do not mean knowing how to follow instructions for how to build a RoR app on a blog, and deploy it on Heroku's free tier (OK, I used bottle.py and JS, but it only took me 3 days) - is incredibly high for a non-connected business founder. There are a lot of people out there with slick talk and "great" "technical" CVs which will impress someone used to navigate in finance-land where the rules are different. These people also happen to be expensive, both in hard cash raised for the company, opportunity cost of launching slower or ruining your reputation, and in the future value of the cash flow you'll inevitably have to outlay to fix the code rot they set in motion before they job hopped yet again. I'm not going to go into what happens when you hire a student "because he's cheap and I just need an MVP", that should be pretty obvious.

When my business friends ask me how to do the technical part, I tell them they have a choice: either they go and read the books I give them (SICP, Codd & Date, etc.) or they trust me entirely, let me hire the CTO, and trust HIM entirely with the technical aspect of the business. Only one took me up on that last offer; they got on well, he trusted the guy, who built the product, they raised USD 600k within a few months, and I just heard that they did 200k USD in revenue last week. Well, a second also did, for an internal team; but they tried to micro-manage the guy against my explicit instructions and he quit 3 months later, letting me know his thoughts on the way out.

I'm not saying become your own CTO. My co-founder solves problems around 30x faster than I do - the ones I can solve, anyway - which we know because I've had to write, badly, some of the codebase for some of our clients (in one case, ~12% of total LoC and 80% of the SQL, although 0% of the Haskell). But being aware of what's going on, being able to help with SQL, HTML and CSS, knowing what dev ops is, figuring out the BI by yourself, being able to talk to clients and write a good functional spec that really separates model and implementation, it doesn't come naturally. You have to study and lay the bases and understand just enough about the field to know how to work with the technical side.