How to Find a Cofounder - Kat Manalac

Hi, I'm Cat Mini Alec, and I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I've been at YC for five years now, and I've seen about 1,300 companies go through the program. Today, I'm going to answer the question: how do I meet a co-founder?

First, I'm going to talk about whether you even need a co-founder. Second, we'll talk about where some of the top YC companies—where their co-founding teams met. Third, we'll talk about what we look for at YC when we're looking at co-founding teams. And finally, we'll talk a little bit about how you might want to split your equity.

It's possible to start a really successful company as a solo founder. 12% of the companies we funded in the last batch were started by a solo founder. But if you look at the top 50 companies by valuation, you'll see that only three of them were started by solo founders. So, you can start a really successful company as a solo founder, but it's hard. Having a co-founder gives you someone not only to split tasks with but someone to split the emotional burden of starting a company with.

I looked at YC companies with a valuation of over a hundred million, and among that population, about half of those teams met in school—mostly during their undergrad years. After that, about 20% of the teams met at work, and then after that, about 16% of the teams were introduced by mutual friends. I also looked at our population of female founders that we funded to see if women meet their co-founders in a different way. Of that population, about 33% of those teams met at school, about 20% of them met at work, and just under 10% met at events.

The easiest way to meet a potential co-founder is through school or work, and that makes sense because you have context. Ideally, you've gotten to see that person perform; you've built respect for their work over time, and hopefully, you've worked on a project together so you know whether you work together well as a team and how well you communicate.

First, we'd like to see well-balanced teams. We like to see teams that can both build the product that they are pitching us and teams that can sell—teams that can communicate clearly and succinctly what it is they're building. Second, we'd like to see teams that have been working together for a little while. I think you'd be surprised by how many people apply to YC with people that they just met a couple of weeks ago. We like to see that you've worked on something together in the past. We want to see some evidence that your team will stick together for the long haul.

Ideally, you've come up with the idea together and you've been working together on building the product since the start. But even if one co-founder came up with the idea and brought the second co-founder on six months later, we still like to see an even equity split. Assuming that the average time to IPO or exit is about 8 to 10 years, this means the vast majority of your company's life is in the future. We like to make sure that all the co-founders on a team feel like they're equally invested and equally ready to work really hard full-time for at least eight to ten years.

If you're not willing to give a potential co-founder equal equity, it might be worth considering whether that’s the right person to bring on the team. And if someone is asking you to be a co-founder and to come on board their team but they're not willing to give you equal equity, you might question whether that person is really going to value your contributions.

So, to sum it up: 94% of the top YC companies have co-founders, and typically they met at school or work. If you're thinking about bringing on a co-founder, we love to see teams that have an equal equity split.