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I have a tip on finding a cofounder. I've been looking for the last 12 months and I tried a lot of things, but the thing that worked best is this: Post a job a
by shawndrost 5y ago
I have a tip on finding a cofounder. I've been looking for the last 12 months and I tried a lot of things, but the thing that worked best is this:
Post a job ad.
That's it. My ad sounded like a normal job in every way, with a title like "Director of X". A couple of specific notes: 1) the first line said "cofounder" in it somewhere, and 2) it specified "part-time to full-time, heavy on equity compensation" somewhere else.
The result: Lots of inappropriate candidates applied. But also, my 2 job posts resulted in three extremely excellent team members: a equity-only cofounder, a mostly-equity cofounder/early hire, and an amazing advisor. I have been working with these folks for months and they are very solid.
I also recommend my vetting process: just like a job. That is, I did a phone screen, a multi-hour interview, a little take-home, and I winnowed down the candidates at each stage. With the chosen few, I kicked off a "let's do this" conversation. My pitch was, "I know it's ridiculous, but let's get business married, we'll set up an offsite and start working together full-time... and, if we really need to, we'll get an annulment". That's what vesting is for!
Hope that helps :)
- TenJack 5y agoOut of curiosity, what kind of product are you working on (B2B, consumer, hardware, etc)?
- shawndrost 5y agoClimate tech / hard tech. https://www.phoenixhydrogen.com/ https://www.phoenixhydrogen.com/
- BolexNOLA 5y agoJust a heads up, the site is a little funky on mobile. It works well enough but i’m finding it’s loading kind of slowly and your big image at the top is not formatting properly and cutting off the words (building green hydrogen’s). I’m also just seeing a bunch of white space between “our vision” and the “learn about green hydrogen” button. Brave on iOS. Now that I’ve said that, this looks really interesting! Good luck with your work, thank you for sharing your experience about finding cofounders.
- kcorbitt 5y agoInteresting -- for the equity-only co-founder you're working with, were they explicitly looking for a co-founder position before you approached them or were they looking for a normal job and changed their mind as a result of seeing your ad?
- shawndrost 5y agoThey had been working on a very similar startup for ~6mo on their own steam, looking for cofounders. Not interested in a job.
- kcorbitt 5y agoDo you know how they found your ad on a job board in that case? Were they explicitly looking for co-founder positions?
- shawndrost 5y agoI haven't asked my cofounder that question, but I did hear from the advisor I mentioned that she was just searching linkedin for a term that's relevant to her, to stay current with the industry.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoI can only afford to pay people through equity and have thought about doing something similar but didn't want to misrepresent the position and waste anyone's time (time is precious on both ends).
- shawndrost 5y agoI encourage you to try anyway. Just correctly represent the position. The point of my advice is this: there is already a well-understood mechanism to find work associates. It's job ads. I have found, through empirical research, that you can find cofounders there too. You can apply that in your circumstances.
- robbrown451 5y agoI don't think a job that doesn't pay counts as a job. Those ads always came off as deceptive to me.... as if they were looking for free work.
- travisjungroth 5y agoThey're a bit out of place. But if you say "Looking for cofounder, equity only." it's hard to call it deceptive.
- robbrown451 5y agoYes, as long as they are crystal clear about it (such as put it in the title, so you don't have people clicking into an ad and then realizing it's not for a job but for an unpaid situation). Still I think this is a good idea.... it's a big enough distinction to need a completely different place to post them.
- seniorivn 5y agoit's unfair to call it unpaid, if you are sharing future benefits.
- tatsuhirosatou 5y agoGreat idea! Where did you post the ad?
- shawndrost 5y agoLinkedin and Indeed, which let you post for free :D
- shoto_io 5y agoLove this advice. I think it reduces the complexity of a difficult problem to a well-known process. It is also very much in line with Mark Suster's advice on finding a co-founder: Hire him/her. Source: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/the-co-founder-mythology-7919a32e17c8 https://bothsidesofthetable.com/the-co-founder-mythology-791...
- lawwantsin17 5y agoThis is a bad idea. Deceptive. No one good wants to be paid in hopes and dreams.