Cofounder Mode: A Tactical Guide to Finding a Cofounder

Published on

October 19th, 2024

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Define your ICP - your Ideal Cofounder Profile

The more specific you are about your ICP, the less time you will waste on people who aren’t a match. The most important factors on paper are:

Skillset
Timing and location
Idea interest

Here’s an example ICP statement that you can share:

I’m looking for a technical cofounder who is ready to commit in the next 2-3 months and work in-person in San Francisco. I’m looking for them to do Product, Design, and Engineering. I am non-technical and can handle Sales, Marketing, and Product. I’m committed to healthtech and have a few ideas, but willing to work on other ideas in healthtech.

Define who you are as a founder by answering the 50 Cofounder Dating questions

First Round Capital created a great list of cofounder questions to ask. They’re a nice self assessment for understanding what is important to you — what’s a dealbreaker and what is acceptable.

It will take 2.5 hours to fill these out, but it’ll save you way more than that over your journey because you’ll know what to look for in a cofounder, and can cut off conversations that aren’t promising.

Here’s a Google Sheet with all the questions— it’s easier to deal with than First Round’s PDF, and you can put your answers right next to a potential cofounder’s answers to see where you agree or disagree.

Important notes on timing

Timing is the hardest thing about finding a cofounder. It took me 9 months to find my cofounder, which seems crazy in hindsight. There just aren’t that many people looking to start a startup at this very moment. Here’s how that’s going to affect you:

Unfortunately cofounder dating takes a few hours over many calendar days. You can’t pack those hours into fewer calendar days.
Going on more cofounder dates in a given week is going to give you diminishing marginal returns. There may only be 3 people on the YC cofounder dating site during any given week who are a great match and great for your timing. Rushing it by going on 20 dates in a week is just going to frustrate you because you’ll end up talking to lots of people who aren’t a good fit for you—you’ll lower your bar. Better to talk to a consistent number of potential cofounders every week over a longer period of time, so more folks have time to match your timing.
Cofounder dating is not a full-time job, and it’s likely to take many months. You should consider what else you’ll be doing while you’re searching. Staying in your job is a good option. Starting to build your company is a good option, though solo founding is very difficult. Taking a break is a good option. I tried doing a little bit of everything- partially founder dating, partially working on an idea, partially trying to relax— and it drove me crazy because it made life difficult to structure and progress was hard to see.
You’ll run into a lot of people who are just thinking about starting a startup but aren’t ready to commit. They’re either not ready to leave a job, testing the waters, looking for new friends, or just fantasizing about being a founder. I’d recommend not spending a ton of time with these people. You can check in with them every month or two to see if anything’s changed.

Find potential cofounder leads

Find leads starting with the most fertile sources of leads:

People you already know: People you have already worked with make great cofounders because you already know them. You know how they work, what energizes or stresses them, and what idea spaces they’re drawn to. You should still make sure they match your ICP though. The list will likely be short—after 10 years of work experience there’s only 7 people on my list (and they all said the timing wasn’t right).
Your extended network: Tell your network that you’re looking for a cofounder and your ICP. Ask them for intros. Even if they don’t know anyone now, you’ll come up the next time they talk to someone looking for a founder.
Cofounder dating apps: Y Combinator has a cofounder matching platform that is available to everyone. It's quite good, and I’ve found the quality of talent to be high. Spend some time browsing profiles, and then go back and tune your own profile to match the style of your favorites. YC does a good job of putting the most important parts of the Ideal Cofounder Profile points front and center on each profile so you can quickly decide if it’s a match.
Events and hackathons are another good top-of-funnel. However you’ll have to explicitly find out who is looking for a cofounder and who isn’t. A lot of folks I met at weekend hackathons and events were perfectly happy at their job and not looking to found something.

The dating funnel

Date 1: 30-minute video intro call

You’re looking for vibes and to confirm that this person fits your ICP.

My strong opinions:

Don’t do coffee on the first date. It’s just too inefficient at this stage. You will be going on a lot of first dates. Zoom meetings take 30m while coffee takes at least 2h total including back and forth scheduling, travel. And it’s less sunk cost if the date is poor. Some will be poor.

Talk about specifics on date 1 - what you’re working on, what ideas you’re excited about lately, why you’re interested in a startup. I spent too many first coffee chats on smalltalk— talking about cool Twitter demos or the latest startup drama didn’t get me much closer to finding my cofounder.

If this person fits your ICP and the vibes are there, you should schedule date 2. If not, it’s important that you don’t schedule a 2h coffee chat. Practice saying no politely if you need to. “It was great meeting you, let’s keep in touch” is usually enough. If they push it you can say “I’m not sure we’re a fit right now, let’s keep in touch via email.” This might sound obvious but every founder dater I’ve talked to has been in this situation before.

Date 2: in-person coffee

You’re still feeling out the vibes and getting deeper into ideas that each other is excited about. At this point you might want to ask about how they work- how much, at home or in-office, what are their favorite projects vs least favorite.

Date 2.5: Take-home assignment- The 50 first cofounder date questions

If things are going well after date 2, you should ask for your PCF (potential cofounder) to answer some of the 50 cofounder questions. I made them fill out all of the questions, but later found there’s only a few that matter.

Do not send them your answers until they’ve written down their answers. You want them to write in their own writing style and their own words without input from you. If they see your answers, the easiest thing to do is agree. The goal of this exercise is to find where you disagree.

Before the meeting share docs and combine them into a single doc side-by-side.

The most controversial questions for me were:

When should we raise money? How much should we raise?
How many hours a week do you want to work?
What does success look like? When would you sell?
Who will be CEO? Who will do the building? Who will do the sales?

Date 3: In-person project (2-3 days)

There are 2 options I’ve seen work here:

Hackathon-style: Go to a hackathon with your cofounder with an idea in mind that has nothing to do with your actual startup ideas. Hackathons are great because they’re time-bound and they let you test a variety of different scenarios and tasks you’ll need to do as a founding team: building, designing, pitching, marketing, working under stress, deciding when to go home, having difficult conversations if something isn’t going to work. Hackathons won’t get you signal on sales or your own idea’s value.

Working on one of your ideas-style: Take one of your ideas and scope a 2-3 day project that both people can contribute to. Ideally it moves the startup forward, but it’s more important for the exercise that both people can contribute roughly equally. Good examples I’ve seen: We want to build and ship a feature and show it to N customers; We want to finish a pitch deck that we can show industry experts; We want to talk to N experts in this industry twice- once to talk about problems and once later to show them a concept. I’m emphasizing talking to outsiders here because seeing how you handle talking to customers is great signal for whether you want to found together.

What’s next:

Next, keep working together as much as possible. If you can both work full time, start right away. If either of you has obligations, like a job or a move, make a plan with dates to get to full-time as soon as possible.

Also make sure throughout the process you’re getting to know each other on a personal level too. I met my cofounder’s wife, did a joint Thanksgiving, met his friends, traded stories about past jobs/projects/hobbies. You’ll be spending a ton of time with this person, so it’s good to know them on a deeper level than just work.

Flags you should look out for and immediately cut things off

(Many of these seem obvious, but people often wait too long to cut things off because it’s uncomfortable.)

You hate their idea and they’re not willing to change it
You’re talking past each other. For example you make a point and they “agree” but they don’t fully understand you and just start to make their own point.
You find out they’re not in your ICP. Eg: They want to be CEO but not willing to do Sales. They said they were technical but they’re not the right kind of technical.
The vibes are off. You will have to fire people as a successful founder. You should fire fast if your cofounder isn’t working out in the early days.
They want to work on this part-time.
They want to quit their job but haven't set a date to do it.

Ending on a positive note

Finding a great cofounder is multiplicative, not additive. It’ll help you move 3-10x faster, not 2x faster. So finding and vetting this person is ultra-high leverage. It’s worth the time and effort, so start early and keep at it. Good luck!

FAQ

(To be extended over time.)

Should I find a cofounder first or an idea first?

There are advantages to both, but my advice is to make sure you're getting in a high quality rep on both:

Working with a cofounder personally sped up my business by about 3x compared to working solo. It's hard to tell how slow you're moving until you're working with someone else who is good and committed.

Not having a cofounder probably shouldn't keep you from moving your startup forward if you have an idea. It's reasonable to work on both if you're able to get in high quality reps.

Rob Balian is the Founder of Reprompt (YC W24), building AI Data Agents for Enterprise.

Comments (2)

Robert Bayer @rwbayer

Great post, Rob! I wish I would have had this during my co-founder search. I like that you developed a process around the search & I especially agree with the importance of getting in-person time working together and aligning on values.

13h

Kevin Tang @kevo1ution

Firebender

Thanks for the write up

13h