Stop Building Alone: How to Find and Evaluate a Co-Founder

Capital, uh, the Founder Institute Global Venture Fund. So I'd like to welcome you all here today. We had several hundred people RSVP to this event, so hopefully we can put together a nice event here where you all can meet some other people that are interested in some of the things that you're passionate about, and God willing, hopefully make some co-founder relationships and introductions today as we get back to the networking portion of the event. So for any of you that came onto the event here a little bit early, you probably saw that there's sort of an online poker room kind of interface where there's a lot of different tables that you can go in there and you can start to network with people. Hopefully you already started to make some connections, but we're going to give you some guidelines during this event when we go back into those rooms when I'm done speaking so you can make even more connections. And our goal here really is to help you find other potential co-founders that you could start then having some productive conversations with to see if it makes sense for you all to pursue a project together. So I know we have a very international crowd here as well. So if you are joining, let us know where you're joining in from. This is a live event, everybody. So anybody who's in the chat, I already see here people from a lot of different places around the world, which is, which is amazing to see. Please do participate in the chat and participate in this event, okay? And when I say that, I say that this event is not meant to be like a traditional webinar, all right? If anyone who's been to a Founder Institute event in the past, you've probably seen that we don't really do traditional webinars at Founder Institute. We try to make all of our events very, very interactive, and this event today is no different. So let me tell you about what we're going to do in terms of the agenda. First, I'm going to go through a quick presentation and try to keep it to about 10 to 15 minutes with just some quick tips from my experience working with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world, seeing a lot of co-founder blowups unfortunately. So just some quick tips around co-founder relationships, how to find co-founders, how to formalize those relationships. And then the second part of the event, which is really the fun part of the event, is the networking portion. And that's where you're going to go back into those networking rooms, all these different tables with different topics where you can jump in and out, talk to different people. And to help you actually have productive conversations in those rooms, we have a worksheet here here, and we'll throw the link to this worksheet in the chat right now so you can download a copy of it. But please do, um, look at that worksheet. That's going to guide what the networking portion of this event is all about. So it's never too early to just start taking a look at it. I really recommend that you download that now. And the second thing that I recommend too for everybody is that, um, because this is really supposed to be an interactive online networking event, We recommend that you get your webcam ready to go, that you're not on a mobile device. Okay, that's going to make it a lot harder for you to participate in the interactive portions of this event. We highly recommend that you're on a desktop or a laptop using either Firefox or Chrome as your browser. Okay, well, let's get some things started here. So in terms of just some of the tips that I have around building a co-founder relationship, finding them, formalizing them, and actually creating co-founder relationships for the long term. There's always been this traditional co-founder mix that has been coined in Silicon Valley. I believe it was Dave McClure, who was the founder of 500 Startups, who coined this in like the early 2010s, right? And what he would use to say was, you know, I look for this traditional co-founder mix, which is the hacker, Right? These are the people that actually build the product. The hustler, these are like kind of the salespeople, the marketing people that raise the funding and really get the product out there and bring the awareness. And then there's the hipsters that actually do sort of the UX, the design. They make it beautiful. They make all the branding beautiful. Um, and they help market the product as well. Right? And this is a very skills-based approach. To looking at what a co-founder team looks like. And for sure, it makes a lot of sense, right, um, to have a skills-based approach. Obviously, if you're building a technology product, you need someone who can actually build it, you need someone who can make it look beautiful, and you need somebody who can sell it, right? The problem is, is that startups are really far from being traditional, okay? So this is probably the biggest mistake that I see when people are starting to build out a co-founding team is that they really look at it just from the, just from the mindset of skill sets, right? I mean, I've literally seen some founders, they say, oh, it was the first tech person that they could find to be their co-founder, so they made them their co-founder and they like barely even knew the person, but they're like, oh, well, I need someone to build the product, right? So they took a totally skills-based approach to finding a co-founder, and that really is the wrong way to do it. It's a recipe for disaster. Okay, so this is Sam Altman. I'm sure a lot of you guys know who he is by now, but, you know, he used to run Y Combinator, which is probably the world's, you know, most prestigious startup accelerator. And from what they've seen is that the number one stage of early death for startups is co-founder blowups. And I can definitely double down on this as well. It's the same thing that we see. And in my opinion, it's because a lot of people go into those co-founder relationships simply looking at it almost like a hiring exercise, right? It's like they're trying to go out and hire somebody. And when you try to go out and hire somebody, what do you focus on the most, right? What is the skill set, the actual like technical skill or the marketing skill or something like that that those people bring to the table? And I'm not selling— saying that it's not important. I'm just saying that it cannot be your only concern, right? If you want to prevent those co-founder blowups, you need to find people with compatible personalities. And this is something that we really, we really know a lot about at the Founder Institute because the Founder Institute as an accelerator, we work with founders much earlier than other accelerators. A lot of times we work with them at the idea stage or even the pre-idea stage. And at that point, we know as an accelerator that your idea is going to change significantly over time in response to customer market feedback, right? So we knew that, OK, if we're an accelerator at that stage and we're going to try to judge people on an admissions process, it'd sort of be a waste of time for us to judge their ideas because we know those ideas will change. So instead, let's try to focus on quantifying what what actually is the makeup of these people, right, of the founders. So we have a social science test that's— it's now been going since 2009, which makes it the longest longitudinal study in the world of entrepreneurial personality traits and the traits that correlate with being a successful or unsuccessful entrepreneur, right? And if you want to learn more about this, you can go to dna.fi.co. Methodology. It is the main admissions criteria that we have for Founder Institute Accelerators, and anyone that applies to Founder Institute Accelerator takes this test and you get the results. And it's interesting, right? But from what we've seen through this research, right, and looking at sort of what are the personality traits that correlate with entrepreneurship, number one, we've identified 26 different drivers of these personality traits, and you can see them all here. But then when we look at, okay, well, how do those personality traits start to mesh together on a team? And what we have seen is that, you know, you really need to have a good mix, right? If you have 3 low scores on any of these categories, you really need to be balancing that out. The co-founder that has 2 high scores on either of those categories, right? If these are the individual traits that make up successful entrepreneurs, it doesn't mean that every single entrepreneur or every single founder on your team needs to have all these traits. Right? But if some of these traits are not present, we have seen and our research has shown that it's going to be a severely limiting factor as you grow out the business. In doing this research, we've also seen that, you know, entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. What we like to say is that there is no one perfect entrepreneur, right? There's different entrepreneurs that are successful depending on location, right? It definitely varies by geography and culture. But there's also different entrepreneurs that just bring different things to the table. And we basically worked with our social scientists to identify, you know, we asked them, okay, well, we have all these traits of entrepreneurs, surely there's probably a different combination of personality traits, or we call them buckets of personality traits that are showing up most often too with our successful entrepreneurs. And they came back to us with these buckets of personality traits and we looked at them and we gave them nice logos and marketing names, right? Just depending on what they sounded like. Right? The hustler, someone who's a go-getter, you know, very outgoing, they can sell anything, a ton of confidence, energy, extroversion, etc., right? That's the hustler. Right? But the hustler, as you could probably imagine, you know, they lack in some other things like organizational skills, strategic thinking, right, and planning and things like that. Right? So you definitely want to have a couple of these different types of personality profiles on your team. And what we've seen is that a lot of these don't particularly mesh well together, right? Number 1, you don't really want to have the same personality profiles on the team, right? And number 2, as you could see here, there's a lot of them that either straight-up clash or really just don't, aren't the perfect mix. So, you know, if you want to learn more about this, I would go to dna.fi.co to just read a little bit more about our research. But just in closing here, guys, on this section, I just want to make it clear that you cannot only be looking at skill sets when you're looking for a potential co-founder at building out a co-founder relationship, okay? The personality meshing portion of it is just as important, if not more important, than the skill sets themselves. Um, and secondly, along kind of the same line, is that you need to align your working styles and goals. Okay, and maybe the best example I can give this is my co-founder dynamic. So my co-founder, whose name's Ade Oresi, you know, he's typically the guy that's on stage. He's typically the guy that you send him at a conference, he's just going to be like the magnet of attention, right? He knows how to work a room, all this stuff. He's very much more of the extrovert, uh, the risk taker. Uh, he's like the hard-charging sales, uh, tech and finance guy. Right? Whereas I'm more introverted for sure, right? I wouldn't say that I'm completely risk-averse, but I'm definitely, you know, a little bit more risk-averse than he is, right? And I'm much more on like kind of the marketing, the ops, and the product side, right? And together, right, those kind of personality traits mixed really well together, right, to make sure he was always the one pushing, okay, well, let's do 1,000, right? And I'm like, wait a second, well, let's maybe do like 500 to make sure it's okay, and then we scale up to 1,000, right? So the dynamic really worked. And I think the thing that made it work was that even though our skill sets were totally different and our personalities were different, right, um, we had aligned working styles. Uh, we definitely had a lot of shared interests, similar work ethic, and we were very, very structured thinkers, right? Anytime a problem came up, we're like, okay, well, how do we break this into like its most simplistic parts? How do we then, um, start to tackle it, you know, from step one, kind of first principles approach. So those are the things that have made this co-founder relationship, I think, work. And then the second thing too, right, is not just aligning the styles, it's aligning your goals. It boggles my mind the number of times I've had talks with co-founders, right, and one of them's like, oh, well, I want to sell the company like as fast as possible. And then the other one's like, oh well, I'm looking to build a generational business that I can hand down to my kids, right? And I'm like, how did you guys not have these conversations beforehand, right? You need to define— don't assume that their goals are the same as yours, right? Everybody has different life circumstances, right? One of them may have a kid that's going off to college in a couple years and they want to make sure that they're home with their kid before they become an empty nester or something like that, right? One of them may define a million-dollar exit as a huge success, whereas the other one may define that as a failure because they're looking for a $100 million exit, right? You need to have these conversations early and often. And there's a link here, bit.ly/34-questions, right? It's just a blog post on our site where it lists out a lot of the different questions that we recommend potential co-founders go over with each other just to make sure that everybody's kind of on the same page and what they define as success. Success as you start to build out the business. The fourth thing that I'll say here too, before I get into sort of how do you formalize the co-founder and find a co-founder, is that you want to find FSO people. Okay, and FSO people are people that figure stuff out, and I won't use the curse word here. And, you know, I love this term because, you know, especially in the corporate world, the corporate world is obsessed with finding specialists, right? It's obsessed with having everything very nicely organized. It's like, okay, well, we need like the world's best like email marketer over here, and then we need a copywriter over here, right? Everything's very specialized. In a startup, there's so many different things to do at any given time. You're going to be forced to do things that you didn't traditionally go to school for, that you weren't trained on, that you have no idea what to do. Right? You're constantly having to teach yourself new things. You're constantly having to figure stuff out. Right? So you need people that, sure, they may have some kind of specialization, but they still have to have that drive and that eager to learn new things. Because again, when you're only 2, 3 people in the early stages of a startup, you know, someone's gonna have to do email marketing who's never done email marketing before, right? Somebody may have to do some public speaking that's never done public speaking before. You're all gonna have to take on a lot of different tasks. So having people that are much more well-rounded, curious, and kind of energized by new challenges is infinitely more valuable than having specialists at the early stages of company. Okay, so just got a couple minutes left here, and then we're going to get to the fun part of this event, which is the networking portion. If you haven't downloaded that worksheet yet, please do. Let's throw that into the chat again. So when it comes to formalizing a co-founder relationship, the one piece of advice that I'll give here is that friendship does not equal business partner, okay? This is another thing that to me is ultra sad, right? Because like good friends will go in and they'll start a business together, and not only does the business blow up, but so does their friendship, right? And that's just a shame. You always need to have a test drive before you really formalize a co-founder relationship and you kind of enter into co-founder agreements. And what we always tell people is that a test drive is mandatory. And the best way to do this is first, don't start talking about your startup as a startup or a business. Start talking about it as a project, right? You're just starting to look at a couple of different things. You're just starting to you know, test out some things and talk to some people and see if this might work. And the best project that we have seen is actually for you to run a live event together for your target audience. And let me explain why. Number one, running an event, if anyone here has run an event, it's almost like a mini startup. Okay, there's a lot of different things to do. There's a deadline, right? Because the event has a date. Right? You need to do things like, okay, we need to reach out to speakers. How are we going to market this event? What are we going to call it? How are we going to promote it? How are we going to run the event? Right? So there's a lot of different things to do. And again, it's kind of a perfect stress test because then you have the co-founders looking at this and like, okay, how do we divide up all of the things that we need to do? Right? It's kind of just like a startup. It's like, okay, there's a lot of tasks. I wasn't trained on this, but sure, I'll take that one. You take this one. Okay, let's divide and conquer. Let's get this done, right? So it's sort of a mini startup. It's a perfect, I think, kind of stress test for the relationship. And the best part about it is that it's not just a theoretical exercise. The whole time that you're running this event and planning this event, you're— what are you doing, right? You're doing all the things that you would need to start doing as a business anyway. You're gonna start building an initial lead list, right, of people that are registering to your event. You're gonna be engaging with the community, right? Maybe you're gonna be talking to other media partners or other interest groups and things like that to promote the event. You're gonna be reaching out to thought leaders in the space to be the speakers to the event, right? You're gonna have to put up a quick website, a registration page. Somebody's gonna have to do the organization of that. Someone's gonna have to host the event, right? So it's all of these things that are really, I think, mimic the uncertainty of a startup and the unclear roles of a startup where everybody kind of has to sit down and say, okay, you know what, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this. So that's something that we strongly recommend, and it's something that we will be using pretty strongly in this upcoming startup co-founder boot camp that we have with applications coming up soon. So in the startup co-founder boot camp, uh, this is a new program that we have, you'll be able to get matched to co-founders, right? So I believe now we have almost 200 people registered to this program and it's still, you know, it's not starting for a little bit and you can get matched to co-founders in this program. You know, a lot of the matching that we'll be doing will be based off that Entrepreneur DNA assessment to make sure that the personality traits are compatible. And then you'll test drive that relationship using our guidance. So again, if you are looking for a co-founder, if you want to meet other people in your space, uh, and you want to, you know, be guided by us through a process to really validate that that co-founder is the right match for you, I recommend that you take a look at it, fi.co/bootcamp/co-founder. So, um, lastly, how do you find co-founders? right? And I realize I don't like to quote myself too much because I don't know, it's kind of awkward and weird, but I am going to quote myself here because I literally have said this so many times to people that it, it almost is— I'm tired of saying it, right? And that is that the lack of a co-founder is a terrible excuse to not get started. It's probably the most common— it Well, maybe lack of funding too, right? But it's either lack of funding or lack of co-founders are the two most common excuses that I hear for people that just never get started on this business idea that they have, right? And it's a terrible excuse. Why? Well, because it's really a chicken and egg problem, right? And I could say the same thing about funding too here, by the way, right? People will say, how am I supposed to get started on my startup when I don't have a team? Right? And it's the same thing people will say with funding. Well, how am I supposed to get started on my startup when I don't have any funding? Right? But in reality, that's the wrong way to look at it because you actually won't find a team unless you get started. Right? And you typically won't raise funding unless you get started and you start to prove that there's a market and you start to show some initial signs of traction that then investors will want to invest in. Right? It's actually by going out there and starting to work on your business, right? Guess what? You're going to then start interacting with other people in the space. You're going to start meeting other people that are passionate about the same problem. You're going to start meeting other people that are experts in the space. You're going to start talking to potential customers who maybe are passionate about the problem too because they see the problem in their day-to-day lives. Right? By actually doing that stuff, by actually interacting with people, that's where you start to meet the types of people that can become co-founders. Okay, so again, um, you know, don't have this attitude, right? Um, it's not the right question. It's not how am I supposed to get started with the team. It's really how are you supposed to find a team if you don't get started, right? Because you typically won't. And I like to put this chart up here too because the most common scenario I see here, the most common pushback that I get is when people are, you know, maybe non-technical founders, right? And they say, oh, well, I, you know, how am I supposed to get started if I can't build something, right? I had a similar chart on this deck like 5 years ago when I first gave like the first version of this presentation and it had a bunch of no-code tools and low-code tools. Right? And there's still some of those on here, but now we just have this new rush of AI tools that are making it less and less and less of a relevant excuse for you to not get started. Okay? If you need to build an app, you can use these tools, right? Doesn't matter how much coding experience that you have. You can have no coding experience, right? If you don't have marketing experience, right? Maybe you need business help, right? There's a lot of tools to help you with that as well. So there's no excuse to not just get started, right? And I promise you that your chances of finding a co-founder will go up exponentially if you just get started and bring the business for as far as you possibly can with the skills and the resources that you do have, right? And part of that also is not just going out and building the product, but engaging, okay? Getting out there, engaging on LinkedIn, sharing what you're talking about, looking at LinkedIn and Facebook groups and Reddit, uh, you know, subreddits and things like that around your space, starting to engage in those discussions, starting to go to events, look on Eventbrite, Meetup, Startup Weekend, things like that. There's different Slack groups, right? And then obviously at Founder Institute, we have our accelerators and boot camps as well, um, where a lot of people can come together, uh, and meet other co-founders too. So the good news is, is that a lot of you are taking a step today, right? If you're in attendance, that means that you're here, you're engaging, you're getting out there. And what we want you to do today is start to do some co-founder networking. So just to reiterate, if you are using a mobile device, you may not— I don't know, maybe at this point Airmeet platform has improved. Their mobile device, but we just typically get a lot of complaints and questions for people using that device. So we definitely recommend that you are on a desktop or a tablet with Chrome or Firefox, right? If you want to do effective networking, we highly recommend if you can to get your webcam on, okay? So if you need to make yourself presentable right now, please do. And you know, you're going to have the opportunity here to jump around a lot of different tables. And to share your feedback and ideas with others. And, you know, our opinion at Founder Institute is that just general networking can be, you know, really not very effective. So we try to give you some strong structure around the networking to help guide you. So if you download that worksheet, bit.ly/cofounder-worksheet, you know, I know, and we've put the link here in the chat, a couple times, you'll see that in that worksheet it asks you to do a couple of things. Number 1, it asks you to briefly describe your idea and your business. OK? And please, guys, trust me, you want to keep this to like 1 sentence. All right? Don't be one of those people that then start talking about your whole life story and all this stuff and how you came up with this idea based off some cartoon you watched when you were 8 years old. All right? Not relevant. What's relevant is you say my company or my project, right? Whatever the name of it is, or you could even skip that. You could just say I am developing a defined offering to help a defined audience solve a problem with secret sauce. And a defined offering, something like a mobile app or a website or an AI tool or something like that, okay? Try to speak plain English. Don't use a lot of buzzwords in that, right? Right? Be super, super simple, right? To help a defined audience, right? So, you know, maybe it's women under 50 in the US that like yoga or something like that, right? Don't just say I'm trying to help women, right? That's a pretty broad target market. It's half the world's population, right? So you do want to be a little bit more specific there, right? What problem are you actually trying to help them solve, right? That's the key thing with the startup is focusing on the problem versus the solution. All right, um, and then finally, the secret sauce is where you do talk a little bit about your solution, the unique thing, right? For anyone that went to business school, this is sort of like your unique value proposition or unique selling proposition, right? What are you doing that's different in order to help this target market solve this problem? Um, then maybe talk a little bit about your background. Why are you building this company? What are you looking for in a co-founder? And the idea is, is that on every single one of these tables, we want you to kind of go around in a circle, share what you're doing. Other people, if you have feedback or ideas, please do share it. Okay? At the early stages when you're looking for a co-founder, feedback is at a premium. You want to get as much feedback as possible. So please do share that feedback. But the last piece of advice that I have here too is don't be a jerk. Okay? If you are sharing feedback, try to, you know, be honest, but be polite. And then the second thing is that, you know, we're not going to have enough team members here of FI to be jumping into every single table. We are going to be jumping around, but we're not going to be in every table at one— at every given time. So we sort of need to self-police here a little bit, guys. Community police this. All right? So if somebody's really hogging the spotlight and taking like 5 minutes and again telling you about their life story or something, right? Somebody should just feel confident enough to just step up and be like, hey, you know, I think you've been talking for a long time, and I think we all agree that, you know, maybe it's time for somebody else, right? So let's try to get through as many of these as possible. You can jump through different tables. You can meet different people. And we're going to be leaving these— this chat room open essentially for as long as people hang out. And in the past, literally, we've We've seen people hang out and talk in these rooms for like 8 hours, which kind of blows my mind, but we'll see. It'll be open for as long as people are hanging out in there. So with that said, get yourself that worksheet, OK? Try to again describe your business as succinctly as possible. Talk about, you know, what's driving you to do this business, what is the type of co-founder that you're looking for, and start sharing your idea, right? Start getting out there and talking about it. Hopefully this event today will give you a first good forum to do that, um, but even after this event, guys, I want you to take that same approach. Get out there, talk about your idea, engage in other communities, subreddits, Slack, local events, online events, whatever it is. Engage in these things. The more that you put yourself out there, the more that you start building your business and and talking about it, that exponentially your chances of finding a great co-founder and even just great business partners and potentially investors too will go up significantly. All right, well, thanks everybody. I hope you have a great time in the chat rooms, and I hope I'll see you again on a Founder Institute event soon. Have fun in those rooms. Don't be a jerk, okay? Keep it to about 3 minutes. And best of luck. Thanks, guys. Bye.