Dharmesh Shah says the best cofounders overlap on values and chemistry but differ in skills: one loves sales, the other doesn't. Since people naturally find similar peers, deliberately seek different circles through events, blogs, and technical communities outside your domain. The internet lets you search hashtags, scan backgrounds, and reach out directly.
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In your co-founder, you want to find someone with complementary skills. If you drew the Venn diagram, there should be some overlap, and the overlap should be the things that you care about in terms of your values, in terms of both growth and all the kind of cliché things. Do you enjoy the same kinds of things? Do you enjoy being around each other? But then there should be like big non-overlapping areas, like, okay, so he loves sales. I hate sales. Like, I hate the act of sales. I don't hate sales as a discipline. So the idea is you want to find someone who's complementary, and that's what makes it so hard because the natural thing— the people you hang out with almost always are the ones that you actually are most like, right? That's why we hang around the people that we hang around with. Make yourself go to either events or hang around in circles, read blogs that people that are different from you would likely go to or read. So if you're a business person, read Hacker News, go to technical events or whatever, because you're much more likely to find your future co-founder in that pool of people. And the other thing is use the internet. Go through the hashtag list, go through all the tweets, and look up their backgrounds or whatever. Find them and reach out. It's like, oh, I see that you're doing X and Y, you've got this background. They're out there. The internet makes it so much easier even for antisocial people like me to find people. I would use that, but just hang out with people that are different and do the homework to try and connect.
