If you're chasing the startup dragon, one of the most important decisions to make will be choosing the right co-founder(s). Here are some extremely valuable lessons that I wish I would've known years ago: Co-founder dating and finding success by partnering with the right people.

Co-Founder Dating

<ul><li>Increase awareness and attract more potential co-founders.</li><li>Reach out to your existing network.</li><li>LinkedIn, former colleagues, existing advisors, etc.</li><li>Join related communities - the more niche the better - and engage with people.</li><li>Explore accelerator, incubator, and startup programs.</li><li>Consideration.</li></ul>

Awareness

<ul><li>Open up your DMs and prep your calendars.</li><li>The main goal of this phase is to get a feel for each other and to ensure that you're aligned on what I refer to as hard constraints.</li><li>A hard constraint is a factor which is a must-have for you to work together.</li><li>Soft constraints are factors which are nice to have but not deal breakers.</li></ul>

Consideration

Only want to partner with co-founders who have a strong intrinsic motivation to work on the same problem, space, and target audience. Ask the following questions:<ul><li>How much equity are you both expecting?</li><li>Are you looking to raise VC or bootstrap? </li><li>What's your timeline? What are your expectations on full-time vs part-time? </li><li>Are you open to joining an accelerator / incubator? </li><li>What type of company do you want to build in 5 years?</li><li>Would this person make a great employee or an advisor or co-founder, etc.?</li><li>Does this person have a solid understanding of how the game works?</li></ul>

Alignment: Vision And Expectations

<ul><li>You need to trust this person to have your back no matter what.</li><li>Would I be excited to hang out with this person outside of work?</li><li>Does this person have an ego? Is this person genuinely interested in getting to know you? Is there a conflict of interest?</li></ul>

Vibe, Trust, and Culture Fit

<ul><li>Soft constraints that are not deal-breakers.</li><li>complementary skillsets.</li><li>good background on paper.</li><li>solid network access to funding.</li><li>geographical location.</li></ul>Don’t deviate too far from these broad strokes.Remember that joining hands as co-founders is an important decision.

Nice To Have In The Deal

<ul><li>Put together and share some initial thoughts & research ahead of time.</li><li>Immediately stand out from any other networking meetings they're having.</li><li>Set the tone upfront that you know what you're talking about, that you care about this space, and that you value their time.</li></ul>

Pro Tips

The main goal of this phase is to get a feel for how well you work together in practice, what your respective roles might end up being, and whether you like spending time with this person.Scoping out a few time-boxed project ideas will give you a sense of the other person's proactiveness. You can ask yourself:Is this person proactive or are you leading the way?

Collaboration

<ul><li>The final stage of the co-founder dating process is actually joining together as partners.</li><li>You make a commitment to building a company together.</li></ul>Are you confident that you can trust them to have your back when nobody else does?If you can answer this question in the positive then you can take a leap of faith and make a go of things together.

The Final Decision

If you’re chasing the startup dragon, one of the most important decisions to make will be choosing the right co-founder(s). Every potential co-founder relationship is different, but after going…

Stashed ideas

A Guide to Finding Awesome Co-Founders

it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup, you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

Pick good cofounders

The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.

Launch fast.

This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementation.

Let your idea evolve.

You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. The second dimension is the one you have the most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that.

Understand your users.

Ideally, you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially, you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.

Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what's possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but <a href="http://www.diaryofawebsite.com/blog/2008/07/wufoo-and-the-art-of-customer-service/">surprisingly good</a>. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see.

Offer surprisingly good customer service.

Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it.

If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and everyday plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.

You make what you measure.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. But it's more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.

Spend little.

"Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.

Get ramen profitable.

Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html">fundraising</a> is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.

Avoid distractions.

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.

Don't get demoralized.

Even if you get demoralized, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html">don't give up</a>. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.

Don't give up.

One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to.

Deals fall through.

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have the most control over is how much you improve users' lives; the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's a mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users.

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#founders

IDEAS ABOUT #founders

A Guide to Finding Awesome Co-Founders

Startups in 13 Sentences

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Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

#founders

IDEAS ABOUT #founders

A Guide to Finding Awesome Co-Founders

Startups in 13 Sentences

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career