

Ask HN: How did you find your cofounder? - a_lifters_life

As a technical person ... i find it increasingly difficult to find a <i>suitable</i>, <i>reliable</i> cofounder to work on one of my ideas, or one of theirs.<p>If you can please explain how you met your cofounder? Were you out looking for one, or was it a thought in the back of your head? Explain.<p>Thanks
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amberes
And what for a +40 someone? Can't go and waste time at school again.

I got contacted by my cofounder. Back when Rails was hot, he looked on forums,
found some posts of mine, investigated further and contacted me.

Didn't work out though. Project got started, has been making profit for years,
but not enough to drop the daytime job.

I find that reliable people my age really have such an outdated view on
business that I know in advance we're not compatible... younger people lack
experience.

I'm thinking lately of switching roles. I had been looking for a non-tech
cofounder, as I've got more than enough coding/sysadmin experience. But the
last 7-8 years, I'm the director of a small business (not my own), learning
marketing, pr, bizdev, hr, ... so I'm thinking I might rather look for someone
to handle the tech part.

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Doches
I've been involved with three startups, and met all three co-founders under
radically different situations. The first startup was a game studio, Blazing
Griffin ([http://blazinggriffin.com](http://blazinggriffin.com)) -- I was
doing hobbyist iOS game dev as a creative outlet during my PhD, and demoed one
of my prototypes to a guy who I ended up starting the studio with at a regular
gamedev drinkup
([https://twitter.com/GameDevEd](https://twitter.com/GameDevEd)). We
eventually parted ways (difference of vision), but I wouldn't say we were
unsuccessful as a co-founding team, since the company is still doing great and
we parted under good terms.

The second was a mini-publishing house (a very strange and very different
business...), which I co-founded with a group of university friends. We had a
couple of common interests, and all had ideas for different projects that
could overlap. These were folks I originally met socially, mostly through a
dance class we all took, but we've had a great time working together and
shipped some pretty excellent things. It may be because we were friends first
and co-founders later, but our working relationship has been consistently
really great.

The third startup is different again. It's not launched yet, but I'm building
it with a three-person team of folks I put together from my day job. We're all
a little disillusioned with corporate work, and realised over a couple
conversations that we we had the technical and business development chops to
put together something really awesome, if only it was something that we had
real ownership of. Hey presto, a team of founders was formed and off we went
in search of ideas (our current prototype is a no-nonsense classified listings
site for apps; read about it at
[http://blog.theappclassifieds.com](http://blog.theappclassifieds.com)).

I'm not sure what the takeaway from all of this might be, other than to just
consistently surround yourself with smart people. Find a place where people
are smarted than you and interested in building the same kinds of things, and
get going.

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partisan
My cofounder is my former manager. We worked together for 6 years before
leaving and chasing the common dream we had of starting our own business.

I made friends at school but very few of them would I consider doing business
with, much less starting a business with. I suppose it depends on how you
select your friends.

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andersthue
I met my co-founders at school, after 11 years I finally figured out it did
not work and that it never would work, been a single founder for the last 6
years and is never going to have a co-founder again.

Remember some people work better as single founders.

Ps. I have employees and always will, I loce being around people at work.

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alain94040
I had great co-founders and bad co-founders. The great ones are people I knew,
whom I respected. I told them my idea. They got excited about it. We discussed
it more and more, until it was clear we were all passionate about it. And we
did it.

I wrote my lessons here: [http://foundrs.com/find-a-
cofounder](http://foundrs.com/find-a-cofounder)

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vmorgulis
There is a PG paper explaining that the best place is at school.

~~~
Doches
I think the PG essay you're referring to is
[http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html),
which includes literally the single line "the best way to meet co-founders is
to go to school with them." While this is almost certainly true, it isn't
exactly actionable advice -- either the OP is still in university, in which
case she's already looking amongst her classmates, or she's graduated, in
which case it's too late.

Although going back to do a postgraduate degree and intentionally looking out
for co-founders is a perfectly valid tactic, so I guess there is something
actionable about it.

