Ask YC: How would you go about finding your other founder (in France)?

[lucite]

(This question is of general interest, but responses specific to France will be of particular interest to me.)

Imagine you have a promising idea for a web service, solid funding and a ripe market; but you lack the developing team to build the site. You don't need "rock star" developers, but you do need some very good ones since the code will require solid logic and the capacity to scale well. And outsourcing is not really an option because your product will require continuous development. Thus, you really need a partner/founder who will be the company's lead developer/CTO (and who will have the contacts to gather the initial team: 1 or 2 other developers).

How do you go about finding this person? There is no job board for this kind of person: you're not looking for an employee, but for someone who will be a full-blown partner. And you're pressed for time: you can't just wait to run into the right person. You need to start tomorrow. Here are the things I've done; please chip in if you can think of others:

# Attend OpenCoffees, BarCamps, etc.

# Check the job boards and community pages of web framework websites, e.g. - symfony-project.org / symfonians.net - cakeforge.org - pradosoft.com - workingwithrails.com

# Scour tech blogs and look for interesting contributors

# Identify good contributors on open source projects (I really wish SourceForge allowed you to geographically locate project contributors)

[rrf]

I thought I'd need a cofounder with Django/Python experience - I found some developers to contact either on the djangoproject website or djangogigs - they were listed by geographic region - and made contact from there

[maxklein]

* Put up a paper on the board at the local university.

[lucite → maxklein]

I may be wrong, but my gut feeling, for a variety of reasons - is that I need someone with more experience. What yo suggest would be fine if I just needed a good developer. But I'm going to try...

[DabAsteroid]

and who will have the contacts to gather the initial team

If they are connected, shouldn't they be possible to find through your own social/business network?

[lucite → DabAsteroid]

Believe me, I've tried. But no one in my network has both skills: capable of developing a complex website AND capable of being a founding partner.

[DabAsteroid → lucite]

I am referring to people you might know through degrees of separation -- not people you know directly. Our acquaintances know further acquaintances know further acquaintances, etc. The networks themselves network.