60 Startup Founders Share How They Met Their Co-Founder
How did you meet your co-founder?
Yeah, it's a funny story. So, uh, do you want to take this one?
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So we went to school, college, College, college. They're both French, but actually, we met at Stanford in California. Week two of MIT, we went to UNI together. I was a freshman; she was a junior. I was the first friend that I made in my high school. We met at Jewish Sleepaway Camp when we were 10 years old. You know, we have no overlapping skills. She is the technical co-founder, and I kind of handle everything else—product, marketing, sales, growth, business ops.
I think a lot of our day-to-day is built on the trust that we've built over 20 years of friendship. We did a choir together in high school. The shared experience was great, but also we have exactly the opposite set of skills in the software engineering space. Like, I've got the product, the front end, and the back end, and I've got machine learning and the cloud architecture. So it was like a perfect match on that end.
Through a mutual friend, through friends skiing, yeah, a mutual friend, Allison, took us on a group ski trip, and Stan just started mooching me off for rides.
Yeah, that’s right. Not only mooching you for rides, but also chewing your ear off on my startup idea.
Yeah, so we were both co-workers. We worked together. Lucas and I used to work at the same company. We met at Airbnb about seven years ago. We shared our passion of, like, how do we decarbonize our lives, and we're like, "What if we did this like full-time?" And then we decided to quit our jobs and interview folks and try to understand again why it was in the carbonization space moving quicker, and this is where we landed.
Alex and I met in 2016 when we were both doing internships in China. We were teammates.
Yeah, yeah, both engineers on the same team at Bolt. We were working together in the same lab for about two and a half years on the project.
And how did you realize, like, "Okay, this is the person I want to work with?" Probably when we were both there on, um, Thanksgiving.
I've only done March Madness once in my life, and that one time was with Microsoft, and I won somehow. So this guy's got the third-best bracket, so he's looking up like, "Who the heck beat me?" And that's how he found me, and then we've been friends ever since.
We're sisters and also co-founders. We are married. We work together as a side project, but then it grew into a startup, and it felt like just working with my best friend. Got married and became co-founders. This is probably our fourth company that we've worked on together, attempted together.
So I matched with Ray's best friend on Tinder. Well, I used Tinder—not to date, but more like LinkedIn during, uh, COVID times.
How did you meet your co-founder?
Uh, through the YC co-founder dating—uh, not dating; a co-founder matching platform through YC. So through the co-founder matching platform, we met on the YC co-founder matching platform. It felt very familiar having used the dating apps before, some swiping right, some swiping left. Finding someone who would share that energy for building in the trucking space was really important, um, and also someone who just had a really strong track record of, um, delivering on technical products.
So managed to find all that in my co-founder. We met in person and kind of hit it off and took it from there.
We met while working at Project 44. I think the thing I remember most from that dinner is Armin telling me he had pet chickens. I was like, "This guy is quite interesting," and then from there, I just learned about all the awesome stuff he was doing in ML Ops, and yeah, we got to talking about building a company together.
Yeah, I was, you know, before that, really hesitant and fearful of, like, actually taking that leap of, like, just quitting, leaving everything behind, sacrificing everything, and like just going for the plunge. It really took someone like Ali to just convince me, give me that confidence to just, like, go for it.
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