Where can I meet people who are serious about working on something together? I've been trying to meet people who may want to be co-founders together or just discuss/hack on some ideas together with the goal of building something bigger.
My connections & network is mostly other tech workers, but so far they have at least been honest with me that they're not interested in building a company or products, they are more into enjoying fat paychecks and there's nothing wrong with that. I've tried to do the same, but I would much rather use my paychecks to give me a good runway for the next few years to fully devote to building a company. Unfortunately for me, I didn't study CS at a top uni either, so I guess whatever chance I could have had to meet people in my prime is out of grasp since I've been out of college for years now.
tl;dr where can I go to meet "serious" co-founder tier people?
No body wants to build your idea for free. For those that are reading this and thinking that finding a cofounder is actually just finding a set of hands you can work with, be buds and create your idea and you can split it 50-50 or whatever. Just stop.
These people don’t exist in the random hallways of the internet. You’re asking for someone to get on your amusement park ride of horror for a multi year commitment, risk it all at great cost on every metric imaginable.
Sorry to be a downer but anyone worth their salt won’t be willing to do that.
I am not willing to be the tech guy for some 20-something business student "idea person."
YC wants cofounders that have strong relationships, clear leadership, and significant/differentiated contributions to the venture by both cofounders.
“Build my idea” founders generally don’t have strong relationships and also not true hustlers, they literally have an idea, nothing more, which is worthless; met 10s of thousands of “founders” and the build my idea founders are definitely a type of (wannabe) founders.
No one cares about ideas, they care about growth, especially if they don’t have an existing relationship with you. If you want ideas, they are easy to find, any experienced founder would be happy to give you “good” ideas for free if they liked you; that does not mean the ideas are guaranteed to work, nor will magically build themselves. If you think your idea is worth something with nothing built, go ask potential customers or investors for money to build it; seriously, if it’s really such a good idea, they’ll give you money to build it; just make sure your estimated costs include realistic market rate labor costs.
It's also very hard to fall with someone else's idea - you are attached, it's your baby, others are not that attached. The job is to allow others to meddle with the idea, so they can treat it like their own.
Personally I've hired 2 people over the past year, one of whom I wanted to become co-founder and he declined - even when he is young, we have a good relationship together and he really had not that much to loose. He is working for respected company and don't just want to dump it like that. That's why joining incubators like YC can help a lot - helps with potential co-founders to join full time, among other things of course.
Sooo, now the plan is to build MVP and achieve early product market fit hehe.
[1] https://youtu.be/ephzgxgOjR0?t=958 I really recommend these videos, as a solo startup founder, working on a project for the past 10 years, at 32 and being broke listenting to this makes me much less isolated. These guys are really articulating ideas perfectly
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
It reminds me of a guy who argued, as a beginner, I could never do security by myself. He pointed out the flaws, I fixed them. Eventually he said I just needed to hire a professional to do these things for me. His friend joked, you mean like you are doing right now? But this was wrong and that was wrong and this and that! His friend: But that is all fixed now isn't it?
An even better story: A guy I knew for a few weeks said he was going swimming. If I could answer his phone for a few hours and write down the messages. His phone rang the whole time! It was some kind of prank. People wanting to buy things, people wanting to sell things, people who owed him money, people he owed money to... It just kept ringing. He planned for it! He squeezed a ton of work into those 3 hours. He was very happy when he returned. A note book full of stuff. He only expected me to answer a few calls but I was to damn curious what the next call was about.
50%?? I did a bunch of coding project for free for peoples companies. Just for fun, no pressure. Last one would probably cost 50 k to get done.
5 min ago I was actually thinking that if I didn't find love I would quit my job and just go help this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6nobuceVd8
Why not?
I would say that in today's remote-first world, building in public (and learning in public[1]) is the best way to get the attention of the stakeholders you desire -- not just prospective cofounders, but also investors, customers, partners, and contributors. (An aside -- this is one of many reasons I believe that commercial open source in particular has a very bright future.)
Some tangible ideas: Be active on twitter, start a podcast, write blog posts, stream on YT, deliver meetup/conference talks. Once you are more in the public eye, living in a Tier 1 city is the next step as it gives you a greater chance of meeting the people who discover you online!
Happy to chat more if you'd like! This subject or specific startup ideas if you're interested twitter.com/benghamine -- DM's open!
[1] https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/
Weird experience, I would love to have another co-founder who can code together or even work together in something tbh. I guess having someone who can code with you together makes it more fun? Rather than having a product guy waiting for you to code
People there despite already being in startups were super excited and interested in other peoples businesses
I had a founder try to poach me at one point, so it’s real enough
If there’s any kind of hub for startups in your city, start there.
If not, check meetup.com or start your own. You’re certainly not alone and there’s definitely (literal) value in being the guy who brings founders together
I certainly don't think we should sit on a web bulletin board and say thing like "only get business partners from IRL networks"
Deleted Comment
I was lucky to have met my non tech cofounder at my previous employer. We remembered each other as great to work with and decided to strike out together.
What you're lookig for is super interesting to me though, and something I think about often from a variety of angles. If you ever wanna chat more in depth about you can find me email in my profile.
I'm told this game is less about what you know than about it is about who you know. And now we've met : )
Oh, and if you shop online for anything you could buy in person, start shopping IRL. Oodles of lifestyle biz or startup potential just from being friendly with store owners and employees. They love friendly tech wizards who want to solve their problems.