
Ask HN: Where did you find your cofounder? - jaredwiener
Did you know your cofounders prior to getting together to start a company?  If not, where did you look? How would you have done it differently in hindsight?
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remyp
I built a side project ( [https://findkismet.com](https://findkismet.com) )
and my cofounder found it. He reached out and a lot (a LOT) of conversations
later we decided to build a company together.

Finding a cofounder is like love: it often happens when you're not looking for
it. The best thing you can do to improve your odds is continue to improve
yourself and put yourself out there.

~~~
jaredwiener
just signed up!

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wjossey
My cofounder is someone I had work with for six years prior to starting our
company together. During that time, he was my boss for all but one year of
that time.

We both happened to leave our prior place of employment one month apart, then
two months later met up again and started working on our current company.

I wouldn’t do anything different in hindsight. There are so many challenges in
starting a company, who you start it with should be as de-risked as possible.
Even with a long working relationship, we constantly have to work on our way
of working to make sure we’re balancing one another properly. Had we not come
into this company with significant prebuilt trust, things could have gone off
the rails at multiple points along the way.

Hope that’s helpful!

~~~
jaredwiener
This is great! Do you ever think about what it would be like starting solo? Or
is the other person part of the de-risking?

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wjossey
I do think about this from time to time, and while I don’t think today I’d
make a good solo founder for a “hyper growth” company, I could probably solo
found a small business decently well.

So, as an example, people become consultants, which is in essence a “small
business”, and they don’t necessarily need a co founder to be successful. They
may have trusted people they turn to for assistance, but generally speaking
it’s a solo endeavor.

A few months ago I spun up a “side project” that is a free mentoring service
for managers (link is in my profile if that’s helpful for you!). It takes up
about five hours a week, I do light promotion for it on social media and HN,
but my total time commitment is fairly capped. I’m not constantly iterating on
potential product angles, or spinning up different business units. It’s just
me, being a good neighbor to fellow managers.

Conversely, my “day job” is really complicated. It’s services and software, in
a field I’m not professionally trained in (organizational development). We do
B2B deals, sign multi year agreements, have to do cold outreach, spend months
trying to win deals, and we’re constantly experimenting with ways to unlock
revenue. If I had to own all of that, plus own the product, I’d be overwhelmed
and ineffective.

So, I take the product. He (my business partner) takes everything else. It
allows us to carve out day to day responsibility and move forward effectively.
If I had to hire for his role, I’d be searching for a unicorn. If he had to
hire for my role, he’d have gotten really half assed results.

For even more complex startups, I can understand why there are three or more
founders. Everyone should bring something special to the table, and own a huge
component of work that is critical to long term success. So, that could be a
marketing wizard, an engineer, and a business developer for some cool consumer
product.

Hope that helps!

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peppuz
Damn this is an hard question everytime people ask, I've been lucky af to be
honest, long story short:

I was a low experience dev and I had a relationship with a girl. She had this
best friend which I've never seen, maybe for gelousy at that time, until that
day, we met, he was totally the opposite from the man of that I thought, he
was nice instead, and asked acute question, he was really really smart, so we
started to go out all together in weekends, get known each other, that was the
begin of a long friendship. Few months later that day he proposed me
(Americans might get confuse) this business idea aimed to solve our specific
problem as students and I felt in love with it so we started to work on the
project together.

I feel lucky because I've never felt this synergy on building something with
anyone, tackling problems on every aspects (from Tech to Legal to Design to
Marketing and so on) with such positive energy and "openmindness" to handle
problems and even pivot if needed. This is one of the ideal aspects of any
cofounder, Luca thinks (and I freaking agree) that cofounders relationship has
to be genuine as old-friends relationships balanced by a spontaneous mindset
to obsessively stay up-to-date with every movement just like having a wife
that stresses you on chat like "Where you at?" but that's because she loves
you, we instead love the idea which the company puts its values on.

What is your story?

~~~
majortennis
*jealousy, beginning of, proposed to me, confused, fell in love. Plus many more

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return1
we built [https://projectilo.com](https://projectilo.com) partly as a way to
encourage collaborations between makers.

