Cofounder Mode: My tactical guide to finding a cofounder

The mindset of wasting 9 months going on dates instead of starting something is so foreign. Based on what this person was looking for (someone to build out his ideas) he would be better off trying to get funding and hiring someone.

It was a job interview (50 question homework, 3 day hackathon trial) plus firm requirements and who has the final say is presented. We didn't hear about the different tests and requirements these 100 dates demanded so it appears one sided.

The best way to meet a cofounder is to be interested in something; so interested you explore it and you find something you like someone else is doing and you talk to them about it. You come up with some idea and you reach out to this person and explore it.

It's reportedly hard to get funding for ideas. Investors want to see a team that is strong enough to iterate through some ideas and pivots. It's not one perfect idea that becomes the product or the company. People actually are too focused on some magic initial milestone. They'll align it with the end of the funding, or the limit of their patience, or the limit of the patience of their support system. That's not how these things work. They're repeated marathons, not sprints. And being focused for nine months on finding a co-founder also seems like an oversized goal, that shouldn't take so much time. It's not uncommon to swap out key people later, including founder, painful as it may be.

> Based on what this person was looking for (someone to build out his ideas) he would be better off trying to get funding and hiring someone.

Yeah.. or even just learning how to code himself. Could learn a decent amount in 9 months.

One is a decent Linkedin post, the other is not.

The skillset to find a cofounder is similar to the skillset needed to raise money. Additionally, founders who try to hire for skillsets they have no experiance in, often find their money wasted.

If you spend 9 months learning to code, you get a junior engineer (at best).

If you sepnd 9 months getting a technical co-founder, you likely get a seasoned engineer + thought partner for all decisions going forward.

One is vastly more valuable than the other.

You don’t need to be a great engineer for most startups, unless they’re particularly specialised. Most apps are really just CRUD at small scale. These apps aren’t really hard until you scale. Eg Airbnb is really simple to make, technically speaking, at small scale.

I think it’s valuable to be able to implement your own ideas. Its going to be more productive than trying to explain what you want to someone else. (This isn’t mutually exclusive with having a cofounder as well)

If you're implementing you're idea's... who is marketing them? Who is handling customer support? What about sales, legal, finance, hr etc?

Writing code is not building a business.