
A Guide to Co-Founder Fit - prostoalex
https://fundersclub.com/blog/2016/08/03/finding-your-cofounder/?utm_campaign=Mattermark+Daily+Weekend+Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=32890852&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_aVCVozPQZiC3LoHaqCw20N0BDLvY2scuWUCGL6FxBywqPFHvvvCzJcT-fQpU-cFJwyAC0xNl8Ap0F4siam39xvfgPXA&_hsmi=32890852
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malux85
> Have a 6 month out-clause in case the technical co-founder does not perform.

AND have a 6 month out-clause in case the non-technical co-founder does not
perform.

I'm a technical founder, and I was sick of building software that went nowhere
... I was capable of building distributed, complex, bugfree software quickly,
but I have no idea how to sell it.

So I searched for a non-technical co-founder, and I was getting sick of people
who ended up being all talk and no action.

So I did this : I built 3 smaller products, with markets I knew fit, then I
told the non-technical co-founders their job was to sell. Their job was to get
relationships going, to get signatures on paper, and to get revenue flowing.
No crap, no excuses, no endless feature requests, revenue.

I found a good co-founder this way, this guy is a lot older than me, but could
sell ice to Eskimos.

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20yrs_no_equity
I think Slicing Pie is a better solution than vesting. It's wrong for a
founder to lose their equity if they work hard for ten months and then have a
split with a cofounder in the tenth month.

Also I suggest founders earn stock, not options in the early days.

If investors want founders on a vesting plan an ISO plan can be created for
them- but the shares they have earned previously are never to be subject to
vesting. Unless investors will have their shares best as well. And none of
them will because they money they put in is real money.... but so is the sweat
founders put in.

~~~
pc86
Why should ten months of work result in a potential payday years later?

~~~
TheCowboy
Many reasons.

You're taking on a risky business venture. You aren't getting a comparable
salary that you could obtain at another company. You don't know if it will
help, hurt, or be neutral with regard to your future career prospects. A
startup is going to more demanding and stressful, and a bigger drain on your
life outside of work. You could find yourself pushed out for unfair reasons,
while you made legitimate contributions. If the startup fails easy on, you
likely won't be eligible for unemployment benefits. All of these risks should
be accounted for when considering your compensation.

If you can't accept giving up equity to people who will not be around when the
company IPOs, then expect to pay a full market salary with benefits.

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piato
What are considered to be the best guides for finding a non-technical
cofounder as a teachnical person? Almost every guide I've read seems to treat
this as easy, yet I found it almost impossible when I tried.

~~~
paulsutter
Why do you think you need one?

[http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html](http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html)

"Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a
business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them
"engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business
guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the
business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew
Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

...

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving
customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler
can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that
problem. And once you apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable
questions, you can create wealth very rapidly"

~~~
dragonwriter
Business isn't UI design, and while it may be a domain that engineers can
learn, it's often one that they aren't interested in learning, and, even if
they are, the time they spend on the learning curve is a disadvantage to the
venture.

~~~
paulsutter
Read the whole essay. Also, engineers who aren't interested in learning what
customers need shouldn't be starting a company.

"Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a
business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them
"engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business
guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the
business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew
Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started."

(side note: I was at Altavista at the time after an acquisition, and that is
exactly what happened)

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timcederman
A small nit - in this context it's "complement", not "compliment".

~~~
rralian
When I see an error like this it makes me take the article less seriously.

~~~
sanderjd
I think the better approach is to think of it like this:
[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/). Oh man! There's this other
word that very precisely means what you have spent your whole life thinking
that other word kinda-sorta also meant! How cool is that??

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ranedk
I could just change a few words in the article and it will work fine as "A
guide to Spouse Fit"

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shash7
The graph's wrongly labelled. You may want to fix that.

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quelsolaar
I was hoping this was going to be an article about co founders having a fit.
I'm disappointed...

