Paul Graham and Drew Houston on How to Find a Co-founder
This was originally posted on my blog.
One of the most common questions I’m asked and that I hear within the young entrepreneurial community is, “How do I find a co-founder?” It’s a hot topic so I asked Paul Graham and a couple founders I know what their thoughts on the subject were and here’s the input I received.
Start a company with a college friend
When I asked PG where I should find a co-founder I was expecting a mind blowing answer that would change the way I thought about startups. Instead he told me, “Think about your friends from college. Start a company with someone that you know and trust. But more importantly, someone you want to work with.”
While the advice seems trivial, PG has a great point. Jumping into a business relationship with someone you don’t know is foolish. Often times the people we trust most are college friends and acquaintances. This doesn’t necessarily have to be your college roommate. It can be a study buddy, someone you sat next to in CS 101 or even a friend of a friend.
Get Technical
As Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox recently said on Quora, “Learn to code enough to bang out a prototype — this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code.
I took the same approach when I started my company. When I first thought of the idea I had no technical skills whatsoever. But instead of spending my time messaging people on LinkedIn, I got my hands dirty and learned front-end development. I used Codeacademy to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript and then learned Twitter Bootstrap on my own. Not only did this help in recruiting my initial team, but six months later when I was managing a team of developers I understood what most concepts meant and could appreciate what they were building.
The reality is that technical people respect those that are able to build things. Naturally, hackers are the type of people who don’t want to imagine something; they want to see that something and understand how it works.
Build things
There’s no better way to demonstrate that you are an A player and capable of starting a company than to build something. As it turns out this is also one of the best ways to find a co-founder.
Bio Cho and Ali Saheli, the founders of Truth and close friends of mine demonstrated this when they first got together to start their company. Bio had just won a hackathon at The University of British Columbia and Ali was looking for a mobile co-founder (he was a back-end developer). After a short email conversation Bio agreed to meet for coffee and the rest was history.
Entrepreneurs are often tinkers and builders so when you build something you’re essentially proving your entrepreneurial drive to others. The same goes for non-technical people too though. Taking a week or two to learn front-end development shows people you aren’t just a jackass with an MBA and “vision.”
Here are a couple other ways and places to find a co-founder:
Attend Startup Weekend — One of the best places to find a cofounder and test a working relationship is to attend Startup Weekend. Organizers of SW often balance the amount of technical and non-technical people that attend so the events have a multitude of skillsets.
Go to Meetups — Depending on the Meetup, these events can be a great opportunity to meet technical and non-technical entrepreneurs alike. Choose Meetups that align with your interests though. But whatever you do, don’t be that guy who surfs the crowd looking for developers.
Social / Open Source communities — Another great place to interact with like-minded people is through social media and open source communities. Sites like Twitter, Dribble, GitHub and Stack Overflow all have talented people interested in everything from design to back-end development. Refer to my initial comment if you go down this route though. Jumping into a business relationship with someone you meet in an online community has it’s dangers just like online dating does. Then again, millions of couples meet on Match.com every year.
If you liked this post, check out my last article on building the perfect startup team, or what I refer to as The Golden Triangle.
