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IMHO, the best way to find like minded co-founders is to actively attend meetups, hackathons, conferences and related events. You will be surprised how often you will find passionate people who are very much willing to work and join forces with people like you.
Good question, has anyone tried Cofounderslab.com or similar services ?
I tried Cofounderslab.com, Collabfinder and did not find the quality people I was looking for.
Perhaps not surprisingly, HN yielded a much higher level of potential collaborators/co-founders. I spoke with a few folks on here and am impressed. Most prefer working with someone in person.
Many Universities nowadays have plenty of resources to the prospective Entrepreneur. Check out the local business schools to see if they host open innovation days.
If you are looking for contractors to help, ODesk and Elance surprised me with some pretty high quality people, but you have to sift through a lot of applications.
Rule 1: Code or Contacts. Hire (at the early stage) only if the person brings something in either department that no one else can do. Most "business co-founders" can't bring funding on an idea. You don't need them, if they can't. Business co-founders are naturally going to end up with a lot of power and you can't afford the slot for a guy who can't make it rain with minimal initial effort (save your effort for building) on your part. You need a guy with the contacts to solve the funding problem, so you can focus on building the product.
Your third co-founder ("the dragon has three heads") should be a crack technologist. Someone even better than you, if you can find him, and not a friend of the business co-founder. If you have two business guys and one technologist, you're not going to have a tech company and they (along with investors) will be calling the shots. In general, you want someone who will push back on technical matters where getting it right is more important than personally winning but always take your side on the political stuff, where the reverse is true.
Once you've established this "initial three" (or 4, if the technical problem merits it) you can hire more business people, but only for defined roles (accounting, business development) and anyone who tries to turn one of your initial team against the rest is fired immediately.
Don't hire a PM until you're at 30 people. "Product" people become necessary when you're hiring second-string engineers. First-stringers PM their own work.
1) Find a place where startup people hang out (in San Antonio, there's a co-working space designed for this called Geekdom). Startup people are rarely found in big companies.
2) Find ways to get involved in the startup community by volunteering or just helping others. You'll determine very quickly who are the quality people and who you'll like working with.
3) Get an idea and go talk to everyone about it. Ask for their advice and get mentored. Even if it's a bad idea, you'll develop relationships and they'll connect you to other startup people who can help or possibly get involved.
Good question, has anyone tried Cofounderslab.com or similar services ?
In this quest, they have brought onboard various experts such as former executives from Match.com, and leading researchers for the Kauffman Foundation. Furthermore, CoFoundersLab has acquired several companies over the years enhancing its IP portfolio, and execution capability.
Through CoFoundersLab, members can search a self-selected pool of cofounder candidates, while getting a much better sense for wether the cofounder candidates posses complementary skills, and have compatible personalities, goals, and values!
There is no "silver bullet" solution, but CoFoundersLab.com is an out of this world better approach to embarking on the journey of cofounder search!
Disclosure: I am the CEO at Onevest and we just announced a merger with CoFoundersLab.
* Write about the topics and projects that you want to work on
* Connect with people with similar interests
* Make time to do small trial projects
* Get outside your comfort zone
* Focus on building something and/or testing a business hypothesis
* Structure your collaborations with tangible deliverables
Give people a nice out (e.g. "thanks for helping test out that idea, sorry it didn't pan out like we hoped") if the project doesn't work well. Think of it like dating.
I will follow up here also. Thank you for the question!
Good question, has anyone tried Cofounderslab.com or similar services ?
CoFoundersLab had been working on solving the problem of cofounder matchmaking for about four years now. It's a big problem: research suggests that of all startups that fail, about 33% fail primarily due to cofounder related issues! In this quest, they have brought onboard various experts such as former executives from Match.com, and leading researchers for the Kauffman Foundation. Furthermore, CoFoundersLab has acqu…