This is the second in a series of posts by by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg giving advice to entrepreneurs on building their young businesses. The first post, From Nothing To Something. How To Get There, is here. And make sure to read our recent posts with advice from Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on his advice to entrepreneurs as well (here and here).
The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?”
Great question – let’s start with a bit of self reflection:
Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends.
Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are.
Great, now ask yourself “are all of them roughly the same height?” I’ll bet most of them are – you included.
And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right? I’ll explain.
The best founding team for a startup is a group of two or three people who have synergistic – not overlapping – skills. Note that it’s also important your goals and passions be similar. If one of you wants to sell fast and the other wants to build a billion dollar business, that’ll make for pretty serious friction down the road. So too would a team where one person’s more interested in enterprise startups while the other person’s passion lies in consumer experiences. With that out of the way, however, it’s critical that you look for people with complementary skills to your own. In consumer internet, that usually means one front-end user-facing developer, one back-end server-side developer, and ultimately a business person (details will come in a later post).
The reality though, is that we tend to hang out with people who are just like us. Remember that story I told about the three business school students telling me about their tech startup, leaving me to wonder who’d actually build the product? I see that all too frequently – from business folks and techies alike. It’s just easier to hang out with people in your same classes at school, or your same group at work.
If you happen to be in school now, you’re in the most fertile place possible to meet your co-founders. Take advantage of it! How’d I meet Elaine and Sandy? Mutual friends from school. How about some other teams? Larry and Sergey from Google met at Stanford. So did Jerry and David from Yahoo!. The Plaxo founders also met in school, which is also where Mark from Facebook met his co-founders. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders? Here are a couple ideas:
1. Join student groups relevant to your interests. If you’re a business major – go check out the Engineering Society’s monthly meeting. If you’re in the CS department, I’ll bet the business school students would kill to meet you at the next Entrepreneurship Club meeting.
2. If your school doesn’t already have a student group designed to foster collaboration between groups of students with the skills necessary to get a startup rolling, start one! BASES at Stanford is a great model to follow. It brings together students from both the undergraduate and graduate levels, across disciplines such as design, computer science and business.
Ok, so most folks reading this are probably out of school. Fortunately, there are a number of examples of successful founding teams that met outside of school. Chad and Steve from YouTube met while working at PayPal. Sean and Shawn from Napster met in an IRC channel. Cisco was a husband and wife team. It helps to be in school, but it’s not an absolute requirement. A few practical ideas applicable to everyone, in school or not:
1. Get out there and find activities that attract diverse groups of people. In Silicon Valley, rock climbing’s a current hot spot for startup folks. So is ultimate frisbee. There’s at least one weekly ultimate frisbee game I’m aware of that’s chock-full of people from the startup industry, on both the business and tech sides.
2. Ask your friends for intros to people in an area you’re trying to learn about. Chances are someone in your group of techies knows someone business oriented. The first folks you meet may not be a fit, but keep asking for referrals and you’ll get there.
3. Join / attend local organizations designed to foster introductions between folks interested in startups. SVASE or Founder Dating in Silicon Valley, First Tuesday in London and Hackers and Founders in New York all come to mind.
4. Team with co-workers at your current job or that internship you did last summer. Just make sure to not violate any non-competes, etc, in the process! Generally speaking, as long as you’re not working on a project your employer would reasonably want to own, you’re probably ok. Of course, do not use any of your employer’s resources. A great friend of mine is scheming, right now, with a co-worker on their next great startup. One’s a PM and the other’s an engineer.
I’m sure some of you are thinking “that’s all great – but I live in the middle of nowhere and none of those resources are available to me.” To be blunt, find a way to move to Silicon Valley. Other cities like New York, Boston, Seattle, LA and Austin TX also have pretty strong startup communities. However, nowhere has as many real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, landlords, employees, co-founders, mentors, and VCs all steeped in startup culture as does Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is just hard to beat. The result is that you’ll be exposed to many more people who can help you get started. In my case, I grew up in Connecticut and spent a fair amount of time in New York – all the while trying to start companies, relatively unsuccessfully. Friends in Silicon Valley kept telling me to move out there for all the reasons I mentioned above. I finally found my ticket in the form of admission to business school in the valley. Find your ticket.
The hardest part of starting from scratch is finding the right co-founders. Ideas, comparatively, are easy. You may spend three years finding your co-founders while you’ll come up with a solid idea every 3 months or so. Luckily, once you settle into a great founding team you’ll be able to execute much faster on that killer idea you all come up with – beating those ten other folks who came up with the same idea at the same time.
Remember, the ultimate goal is to create a founding team that can, within its own skill set, get a working prototype out the door. This means you need to find folks with skills that compensate for your weaknesses. Co-founding a startup is like getting into a marriage – picking the right people is critical. In later posts I’ll get more specific on how to figure out if the folks you’re meeting are the right people to work with, and also how to deal with issues like splitting equity and paying yourselves before raising funding. Feel free to follow me on Twitter to get notifications of later posts on this topic, both here and on the Meebo Blog.
This is the most useful article I have ever read on this site in the last year and a half.
Thank you very much; this is exactly what I needed to read for motivation!
yep, this stuff is gold for entrepreneurs.
And I’m still a student in school… double gold for me.
I realize that I have two years left to take hold of an opportunity that will likely never resurface.
Andre, yes, the opportunities while in school are certainly greater. However, even after graduating, if you remain plugged into your school’s alumni network, the same beenfits and opportunities should eb evailable even after graduating.
The other stuff being posted here are becoming just not interesting. TC watch your downfall!
Super! I like the fact that Techcrunch encourages successful entrepreneurs to publish their “how-i-did-it” stories. Keep it up! This theme is like a breath of fresh air, as pure reporting about companies raising new money, selling out, etc. gets a bit tedious after a while…whereas these articles resonate with new and wannabe entrepreneurs..
I just threw up in my mouth after reading this drivel. Such utter, contemptuous, self absorbed, what is the word I am searching for…
….CRAP.
The “advice” presented here targets kids with dreamy ideas, and little to no connections.
Fact: Most entrepreneurs are over 30 years old.
Fact: Most small business owners already have completed University.
So unless this genius has an outline on building a time machine, his advice is useless.
Here is a better idea:
1. Come up with an idea that is pragmatic, that does something better than what exists or provides a service that is NEEDED that does not exist.
2. Find money anywhere in the world EXCEPT from VCs. They are the Devil. You go to them, and you will fail. Simple as that.
3. Keep overhead small, small small. Keep salaries smaller, smaller smaller.
4. Expand ONLY when you have generated enough revenue to keep you alive 2 years from today. Only then.
5. Don’t read techcrunch. It sucks balls.
LOL out loud!
oh hey, this just in… if you don’t like the articles go somewhere else.
you’re just making yourself look like an idiot.
Great post – thanks for this Seth. Makes me very comfortable with the choices we’ve made!
Two other events that are good for serious conversation among entrepreneurs are Bootstrapper Breakfast http://www.boot...rbreakfast.com/ and Hackers and Founders http://www.hack...ndfounders.com/
One of my professors told me to get an MBA to meet a co-founder. He said “you’ll be a hot commodity over there.” Classic.
So, did you?
No, that’s solid advice though.
Instead I joined an gaming & electronics company… he also told me to save a bunch of money so I could quite my day job and since it would cost money that I don’t already have to go to grad school it’s more appropriate for my particular situation.
damn, i’m illiterate… never would’ve made it through anyway
“To be blunt, find a way to move to Silicon Valley.”
It’s good to see this in writing. Hopefully, everyone reading this takes away something from this assertion.
The idea that one location is that important is ignorant. I’ve seen plenty of people be successful without ever going to the valley.
Awesome stuff! And you really got a point there.
Time to learn rock climbing!
What about going it all alone?Whether that would be a advantage or an disadvantage as the success of the project depends only on it’s idea and not on founders..
i would disagree completely. Ideas are important.. but you need gr8 ppl to be executing it. Take facebook – it was not the 1st social n/w but now is the biggest.. y? because of mark zuckerbergs probably. Google – not the 1st search engine infact when they started there wer likes of Yahoo, AltaVista already in the market… Idea is imp but at the end of the day it the vision and the grit of the founders that brings the company to the shores of success.
Almost everyone knows the success of a project depends on execution first, idea second.
So Webvan failed because of its execution? Same with Pets.com?
More often than not, a startup/company fails because the product developed is not what the marketplace sought.
Certainly there are cases of poor execution sinking a company. But at the end of the day, it is about a product being accepted. No amount of execution can help that.
Great overview of one of the hardest aspects of any business. I like the mention of IRC, and would recommend Freenode as the best overall tech-oriented network.
Seth, i was expecting better from your second post, its not a common fact that once you get going you know who to choose for start ups as your co founder, most often you may not need a co-founder.
There are many examples, Zuckerberg, Gurbaksh Chahal and many many more, also you have already thrown light over this matter on this in your first post.
This time things like, Patent, copyrights, other basic rules like technical issues and complications were something i was expecting from you.
Hopefully next time you will make more sense and will talk less on obvious things.
abhay, Aaron Patzer said the most on this topic. He said that you need a reliable business plan, six months of cash on hand, and cheap labor. His presentation makes me think of that Kung Fu Panda movie: there is no secret recipe.
thanks Eli for introducing Patzer to me.
Very useful post, thanks. It’s seemingly difficult, as a recent technology graduate from England, to break into Silicon Valley.
Curse those H1B visas.
Hey Sunil – yeah, the H1B visa situation is terrible. @ericries has been helping to lead the charge around a startup visa. Do a search in Twitter for #startupvisa to learn more.
I love tech Crunch. I haven’t been able to stop reading since I discovered it on the Y-Combinator website. Just thought I would express my appreciation.
James Bellefeuille
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
u don’t know WTF you are talking about abhay, facebook was not founded solely by zuck, so take a seat.
great article Seth, powerful insight for those curious
Zuck, i know what im talking abt, Zuckerberg took help of Sean Parker and before it was other his friends but you are missing the point, finding co-founder for your company is not that tough of a job as hyped by seth, Zuckerberg’s courage took him where he is today.
We need to know what happens when you have idea in mind, what do you do next, worry about co-founders(i dnt think so) we wanna know how we protect that idea from being stolen, may be then comes founder or co-founders, Seth skipped important point here.
Great advice:
In consumer internet, that usually means one front-end user-facing developer, one back-end server-side developer, and ultimately a business person.
Short and sweet.
Any of you bizdev types located in the valley looking to team up with a tech guy? If so, shoot me an intro email at ryoma8ito@gmail.com
A little about me:
- Degree in computer engineering w/ management science option
- Built several web 2.0 sites from scratch
- Experienced with the majority of the social api’s (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Meebo, PayPal, Flickr)
- Experience managing offshore dev teams
- Most recently a Director of Product Development at an early stage funded startup
Loved the Post! Can’t wait for the future posts =)
another simple option is to use http://www.partnerup.com which is some sort of dating website for entrepreneurs.
A little off topic maybe, but Michael, I think I found your european massage therapist double! You have an uncanny look alike with the fellow in this video.
chke this video out: http://www.yout...h?v=_dzIn9egKY0
WOW!!! Great advice! Find others who’s skills don’t overlap with yours… simple but true.
This post is higly valuable not only for founders-to-be, but for entrepreneurship supporting organizations world-wide.
As an business incubation professional (well, here in Europe, business incubation is somehow different, being less pragmatic and less a business per se), I got an excellent insight on types of activities that could be developed in order to bring together the 2-3 medium or long-term matching individuals that I would like to assist at a latter stage when they will start a business, and also to continue complementing the CS summer internships offered in our incubator with openinigs specially designed for business science students.
Great stuff as was Seth’s previous material in TC. Keep up with the good job.
Union is strength!
Quality matters more than quantity.
yep, this stuff is gold for entrepreneurs.
åŸBlog:meng.edublogs.org
http://www.hndir.com — verified undergrad students who read hacker news, made for the purpose of allowing undergrads to easily find technical cofounders
This article can be summed up in the last paragraph.
I also disagree that moving to silicon valley is must to create a technology company.
I could also argue that staying away from silicon valley could be a good thing to get away from group think that so often happens.
Are you a rock-star programmer (PHP, AJAX, HMTL, etc)?! Do you want to be a co-founder of a potentially world-changing start-up?! If so, drop me an email at s10.oleynik (at) gmail.com and let’s see if we can change the world together!
Stan
There are also a few sites out there dedicated to finding startup founders, and two that I’m familiar with are cofoundr.com and partnerup.com.
I haven’t had much success finding folks online but you may still want to check them out.
Julia
great post….
the best part is the need to get out a working prototype fast before the guy around the corner beats you to it.
yahoo, amazon, ebay, paypal – were all very different from what they are today – but they were first movers and as such were able to dominate their markets.
Good Post!! Finding a good co founder is the single most important task for any new business after finding the right idea!
Sometimes you need your first start-up to find out
“Of course, do not use any of your employer’s resources.”
Was that said with a nudge and a wink?
Yo, I’m using so much of my employer’s resources I may as well have my business cards printed with their address on.
Or, alternatively, you can start a company with your girlfriend’s friends’ boyfriends, who are also your drinking buddies.
Great post Seth; well-written and on point. I know plenty of folks out there on their own. It’s much, much harder.
no no n o
Do you need a co-founder when you have already launched your project in demo test ?
Not sure why there’s always so much hate around ideas.
Google and Facebook are fantastic examples of genius execution as mentioned but they are not ideas, they are better versions of other peoples ideas. Where would we be without the innovators who thought up a “search engine” or a “social network”
Execution is labor and without it nothing gets done but ideas are change, fantastic ideas challenge who we are and allow us to become something new.
I see lots of great execution on the Internet and I hear lots of chatter that Ideas are dime a dozen but I don’t see many new or innovative Ideas.
Great post Seth! Very informative and useful for us building our companies and concepts out.
Excellent post. Tech Crunch should have more articles like this.
Great guest author. Simply stated post on co-founding. More like this TC.
OK – I’m out on a limb here, but after thirty years as a business professional and 30 plus as an astrologer I’d say that the steps to take to find your co-founders are the following:
1. Honestly assess your own strengths and weaknesses thoroughly.
2. Find people who complement your strengths and have the skills to supplement where you are weak.
And how do you do this? Go to a reputable business astrologer and work with him/her to complete steps 1 and 2.
I’m not kidding. There is no better way to be sure you’re gathering the whole skill-set you need for success.
Great post!
At techVenture, we’re often taking on the difficult task of helping startups with co-founder searches and have created a Co-Founder Network to connect these entrepreneurs.
http://techvent...ork/co-founder/
all this sounds more like writer justifying his mba. jerry & david, sergey & larry all had exact same background and did awesome. let’s see how long meebo lasts …
> Cisco was a husband and wife team.
Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner met while working at Stanford in different IT organizations that had trouble communicating electronically….
and no, they didn’t invent the router, Bill Yeager did.
cant see comments
The most powerful founding teams create a Reality Distortion Field (RDF) to which, in the greatest examples, entire industries must yield.
The trick is finding co-founders who mentally gel around a common vision of reality in a way that is unshakable.
Finding co-founders with complementary “skill sets” is not important–look at one of the greatest founding teams of all time–Larry and Sergey. Their RDF was so powerful it attracted some of the most capable business people in the world. Imagine Larry instead co-founded with a business person. Despite having a full vision of what a search engine should be and the skills to build it, Larry would have had tough time holding on to his RDF if his co-founder held a less grand vision of reality: “We should totally sell to Yahoo!, what if this company doesn’t go anywhere??”
Holding an RDF is *much* easier when two of you are holding it together. Industry-changing RDFs are probably impossible to hold by yourself, unless you are Steve Jobs looking at mobile phones. But even he needed The Woz on his first try at age 19.
Had Seth’s co-founders lacked technical skills, but had the same enthusiasm around the RDF of bringing IM to the browser, they would have been equally successful. Granted, it would have been harder to generate that RDF as 3 business dudes twiddling their thumbs around a table, but if they generated it, great technical people would have joined them.
Every big startup success had a powerful RDF at it’s founding and beyond, not all had founding teams with complementary skills–that just happened to be the case for Meebo.
perhaps not mentioned explicitly in seth’s post, but i think related advice would be:
“Start a company with someone you’ve spent a good bit of time with”.
(where “a good bit” = 6-12 months or more)
i’m not sure it’s such a good idea to go seeking founders without having a long dating period. it takes time to get to know who people are / how they work, and i don’t see most people figuring that out until they’ve spent at least 3-6 months together, and probably longer.
my .02,
Not sure I buy the height analogy. Height has a pretty tight, normal distribution. Most people are close to the median.
I tend to use suppliers! I look for someone who can help me develop, or sell, or whatever I need. If their initial response convinces me that I could gladly work with them, from a professional and personal point of view, I rapidly consider bringing them in. Does that make sense?
Francesco.