How to Find the Right Co-Founder for Your Startup
What qualities to look for and avoid in a potential co-founder.
Finding a co-founder is very different from any hiring. It is almost like 20 years of marriage from the first day, kids, a mortgage, and merged social life and career goals. A co-founder should be someone you can trust with your business and personal life. You need to have the same vision and goals for the company and be able to work well together.
I spoke with over 30 founders. And obviously had to talk to founders from YC, as we all know there, especially Paul Graham’s emphasis on the importance of a good founder. To discuss this topic and my findings in detail and hear the thoughts of current and future founders, we gathered for supper with Jan’s Roundtable. Some of my friends were active or previous seniors from companies like Google, Revolut, and SVB. Others were founders or team members of tech companies that had passed the seed or series A stages, such as Adjoint, Rebank, Integrated Finance, GoPuff.The main points of the three hours of conversation were around different types of founders and desired and unwanted treats.
A common perception of an ideal founder team is that one partner should be strong in tech skills while the other focuses on the business side of things. However, the top quality for these teams had nothing to do with either skill set; instead, it was trust between partners.
Gathering around a supper table to talk about experiences and share knowledge helped me put what I already knew into a list and prioritise them.
What qualities are desired in a fellow founder?
Trust
Above all, trust is the most vital characteristic for a co-founder. You have to be able to hinge your business and individual life on them. It’s also necessary that you can get along well and rely on each other. And after successfully securing funding, this dynamic becomes even more critical as the startup’s inner circle widens to include employees, investors and customers alike.
Values and be Good
Your values must be compatible with your co-founder’s to achieve common goals as a company; however, this will differ depending on the person. Having compatible philosophies enables achieving a positive team dynamic and great community relationships. For example, if your only priority is valuation without any ethical considerations, you’re not going to get along well with someone who prioritises their team’s mental health and well-being.
Complimentary Skills and Personalities
This would be the first to come to mind of any person to pair up with a founder. The most common is for a CTO to pair up with someone who can fill the CEO and COO’s shoes. So, while a person is building, other co-founders or co-founders do business development and come back with new users and their feedback for features that would help the business grow.
Resilience
Start-up is a challenging journey; as my friend, Stephen Diehl, calls it, “Fight against reality! Everyday!”. So, if the fellow founder is a quitter, there is no chance of survival in the long run. Someone who would keep up the team’s spirit and work well under pressure with team members, customers and investors.
Adaptability
As soon as you incorporate your company, you quickly learn not only technology-related topics but corporate law, accountancy, finance, and human resources. So in each stage of the journey, you might need to wear a different hat. At the same time, the technical founder might need to learn a new language or learn how to lead a team when themselves is the decision-maker.
Dynamic of the relationship between founders:
In successful Startups, there is always a more vital founder. Who pushes for the vision and enables decision-making. Breaking ties between founders is essential to save time and energy. No action is dangerous for any startup at any stage. There are no perfect decisions. So the strong founder sets curate the rota.
Type of Founder to be avoided!
In some cases, a lousy co-founder can be the most harmful thing to your startup. The most typical wrong co-founder type is the person who has to offer one-off benefits like finding the investor or signing the first client. In the early stage, while nothing else is set up, this may look as though it has value; however, if they have nothing else to contribute, they are simply dead weight or the most costly broker you ever hired.
How to be a successful solo founder
If you want to be a successful solo founder, take Eliam Medina’s advice and turn yourself into what you expect from your ideal co-founder. Additionally, it is helpful to surround yourself with other founders for support.
Conclusion
The qualities that are desired in a fellow co-founder can be summed up as trust, complementary skills and personalities, resilience, and adaptability. These are all top requirements to overcome the challenges of startup life. If you cannot find someone with these qualities to partner with, it may be best to go solo. So if you’re determined to make your startup dreams a reality, don’t let the search for a perfect co-founder hold you back — go out there and make it happen!
