>> Now the bar for new products it's absurdly high if you're out of the YC or San Francisco VC circles or if you do not have anyone in the industry; plus most of the VCs prefer to invest in "pedigree founders" than in unknown people, especially if those people are outside of the bay area.

I suppose that's if you pursue the "SAAS AI Analytics Crypto Cloud" latest hype where all the low hanging fruit has been picked already.

I'm in EU (Romania) and don't feel the least bit concerned or connected about San Francisco VCs and yet I'm preparing not one but two businesses which could go to 100s of millions (first) or billions (second).

1) First is a plain brick-and-mortar physical product delivery thing. Zero competition from "YC San Francisco VC" crowd who almost exclusively targets computer-only stuff as it's much easier and cleaner to deal with. But if you have the brains for computers (and I've been working as a well paid eastern European software dev for 20+ years), you can most definitely compete in the "physical" world should you identify an opportunity there as I did. This is the businesses that I estimate in the half billion before it reaches saturation or someone steals it from me.

2) Second is online services hence much easier to deliver and to grow hence with the properly polished product (which sells as hot cake in a brick and mortar setting) and target market should have no problem reaching billions. Provided that #1 works well enough to kickstart me into #2.

So ... cofounders. Anyone interested?

If so send me a mail or go on my forum and enter "sunshine" when you register yourself (so I know you're not a spambot, they are this dumb):

https://www.aquarianz.com/contact.html

It has never been easier to create your own company if you have the proper grid.

Reduce your workhours to half day or 80%, spend your evenings and weekends building.

Show your demo around to get more money if your progress is slow.

But technology has never been as accessable as it is today. You have a lptop, a server costs you 50$, a big machine perhaps 100 or 200 / month.

The problem are people who think just having an idea is the main part of creating a product/company.

I have more ideas per day than non technical people and i could make 50% work. Not unicorn work but making enough money for a company money.

Its just a lot nicer to work from mo-fr earning good money and having time for living.

Trying my best to put this politely, but this reads like a list of excuses.

If you have dependents and a stable income is important then by all means, wait for the perfect conditons to arise (they likely won't - or when they do, everyone else will also be taking advantage of such conditons).

Otherwise, take the plunge. Reduce your expenses e.g live in crappy apartment to save money and go all in on your dreams

Honestly, in this situation, you want paying customers not VC-funding. YC at least has an objective application process (VC's don't, it just cold-email) and even then the acceptance rate makes it a non-viable dependable strategies. Especially if you're enterprise SaaS..the question you need to answer is, how do you get a customer to pay?

(Sometimes having a co-founder here helps to answer this question)

People playing their options on multiple fronts is even worse than finding a way to increase and maintain the increased levels of participation.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

Are you talking about some other scenario, rather than OP? (i.e. the archetypal 'co-founder dater'?)

OP is a technical co-founder - ex-Facebook and Stanford computer science, it seems.

So is this what Y Combinator is attracting nowadays

Yes, this process also filters out candidates who would refuse to go in such a hiring process.

I think the goals of having a good match are nevertheless important. Perhaps it is better to communicate these goals to your candidate co-founder and figure out together what the best approach is to verify them.

Good q and I can't name one either. Though I suspect when you're successful you tell a modified story about how you met.

"I ran a tight interview process and selected the best match based on vibes and a spreadsheet" isn't super inspiring to customers, employees, investors.

Dropbox comes to mind.

Yes, what happened to building side projects? Meeting people that you've worked with that you would care enough to build something with?

Coinbase is probably an example.

thats like doing tinder instead of talking to users and building it

If you take a look at the Linkedin resume it seems his last technical job was 12 years ago and in an unrelated area to what he's currently trying to build. All in all his on-hands professional software engineering work seems to be limited to 2-4 years. Most of his experience seems to be product-related type work, including his work at Meta.

Combined with him calling himself a non-technical founder it seems pretty on point. He's not looking to be coding and making all the nitty gritty engineering decisions, there are better people for that in his opinion. Which is totally fine.

If the example is something like this: "I am non-technical and can handle Sales, Marketing, and Product. " it does seem to be written from a non-technical person.

Ex-meta doesn't mean anything. As far as i know manager / non technical people work at meta as in any other 'tech' company.

You are correct. Thanks for defending me a bit on the internet Yaseer! Also going to ping you offline, your company looks great and relevant to us.

> Unfortunately this means you’re an undifferentiated untechnical person trying to attract highly in demand talent to work on your vague idea.

Bafflingly, the author is technical, the CTO. That makes this course of action even more confusing.

These articles are always written absurdly early, too. Reprompt AI is apparently brand new and pre-seed. It's not a success nor has the founder relationship stood the test of time. This would be much better written in five or ten years.

It can be better! Potential co-founder asked me to bring my own 9000€ for company’s registration (in Germany). I didn’t. A year later the company ditched all hardware and went software only. I dodged a bullet as a hardware developer as I see it today.