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Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

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Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#41

Post by jacquesm »

999900000999 wrote: post #31
exolymph wrote: post #16

Cofounder matching is a market for lemons, much like online dating. The best prospects are either never on the open market, or get snapped up very quickly. So it's always a problem of sorting through many low-quality options to find diamonds in the rough (and if you can find one, upgrading a rough diamond to a shiny diamond is still a nontrivial process). Point being, cofounder matching is inherently a frustrating gr…

To be fair, I've met plenty of idea guys in real life. I can't imagine the internet somehow being worse. It's always ' I want Multi billion dollar company X combined with multi billion dollar company Z. Build this for me in exchange for 2.5% equity vested over 5 years.' Then if you do waste a weekend on a POC you'll hear it doesn't match their vision. You don't even get a thank you from these jerks. TBH I've given up…

> It's always ' I want Multi billion dollar company X combined with multi billion dollar company Z. Build this for me in exchange for 2.5% equity vested over 5 years.'

Those are the generous ones.

If you're a tech person and you 'join as employee #1' then you have just decreased your chances for a reasonable payday by about 90%. So make sure that salary is a substantial one, or negotiate for double digits stock. Otherwise: better to be a founder. Same risks, more control, better payday if it works out.

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#43

Post by jacquesm »

threeseed wrote: post #33
robust-cactus wrote: post #22

I've heard it works and it has caused companies to form and get funded. I signed up like 1 week ago and I'm a 2nd time founder. It depends on your expectations and how you configure it is my read. For me, even though I'm technical, I'm mostly looking for other technical founders. Other than that, the thing I mainly want to feel when I read a profile is a sense of "oh this person would be fun to jam on ideas with" and…

> and it has caused companies to form and get funded I am far more interested in what percentage fail because of a breakdown in the founder relationship. It's easy to start a company and get funded, when you have a great team. It's very difficult to maintain that relationship for a decade or more.

> I am far more interested in what percentage fail because of a breakdown in the founder relationship.

In my experience this happens far more often than issues with tech, but less frequently than running out of cash due to failure in product market fit for pure software plays.

Hardware companies tend to be rough for the founders, unless they are extremely savvy at raising funds.

The longer a start-up remains in the start-up phase the bigger the chance for co-founder conflicts due to differences in expectations and changing life circumstances.

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#45

Post by shrimpx »

Zetice wrote: post #4

Your network is going to help you with this 10x as much as random matching would. I doubt random matching is even very successful, compared to organically finding a partner. Ask around, see what people in your network know about folks who are building new things. They may even have ideas about folks who would build something if the right partner were to help them.

I don't think it's 10x. Your network is likely to be limited. Coworkers, buddies from school, friends of family? When you filter out all the ones with careers/no interest in starting a company, and then the ones you don't want to work with, you think you're left with highly relevant matches?

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#46

Post by yieldcrv »

m348e912 wrote: post #3

Just do what Brian Armstrong did. It seemed to work out pretty well for him. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664

interesting, he was 31 at the time, bitcoin did not get outlawed by the US government and he got to sell shares of his new company after a direct listing at a $100bn valuation for a little while hm.

does look like any other pie in the sky idea.

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#47

Post by robust-cactus »

threeseed wrote: post #33
robust-cactus wrote: post #22

I've heard it works and it has caused companies to form and get funded. I signed up like 1 week ago and I'm a 2nd time founder. It depends on your expectations and how you configure it is my read. For me, even though I'm technical, I'm mostly looking for other technical founders. Other than that, the thing I mainly want to feel when I read a profile is a sense of "oh this person would be fun to jam on ideas with" and…

> and it has caused companies to form and get funded I am far more interested in what percentage fail because of a breakdown in the founder relationship. It's easy to start a company and get funded, when you have a great team. It's very difficult to maintain that relationship for a decade or more.

Separating signal from noise is going to be interesting here. Startups founded by friends, former co-workers or network all fail. Exiting isn't guaranteed, nor is product market fit or any amount of success. Most startups fail.

Yes it will be cool when we can see stats like "co-founder matching has created X startups, and you're Y% more likely to succeed." Those stats take time to reach significance. For now, it's OK for it to ride on vision + early indicators like "# of startups founded".

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#48

Post by snowmaker »

Hello - I'm one of the people at YC who work on YC's co-founder matching site (which, if you aren't familiar with it, is at https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching).

It's not totally clear to me if OP is referring to that product specifically or something else, but I figured I would take the opportunity to get feedback anyway!

We are very actively working on the co-founder matching site and would love to hear from people who have used it - what your experience was and how we could make it better.

We've been running the site for about two years now, since we launched it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750298. Coincidentally, the idea actually grew out of open threads just like the ones OP suggested. We started by experimenting with those threads on HN and our Startup School forum, but nobody ever found an actual co-founder that way.

So we decided to build it as an actual product. Since we launched, over 20 teams that met on the site have gotten funded by YC, and many of them are doing quite well. So we think the early results are overall promising.

That said, co-founder matching is a very hard problem. It's a multi-sided marketplace with complex dynamics, and we know we have a lot of work to do to make it work for everyone. We'd love your feedback if you've tried it.

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#49

Post by amir734jj »

snowmaker wrote: post #48

Hello - I'm one of the people at YC who work on YC's co-founder matching site (which, if you aren't familiar with it, is at https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching ). It's not totally clear to me if OP is referring to that product specifically or something else, but I figured I would take the opportunity to get feedback anyway! We are very actively working on the co-founder matching site and would love to hear…

Thank you so much for the reply. Can you please add a search or filtering? I don't want to keep clicking "next"

Re: Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

#50

Post by maerF0x0 »

exolymph wrote: post #16

Cofounder matching is a market for lemons, much like online dating. The best prospects are either never on the open market, or get snapped up very quickly. So it's always a problem of sorting through many low-quality options to find diamonds in the rough (and if you can find one, upgrading a rough diamond to a shiny diamond is still a nontrivial process). Point being, cofounder matching is inherently a frustrating gr…

> much like online dating

Interesting that you just called about 40% of the <50yrs old population "lemons"

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