How to Find a Technical Cofounder - Michael Seibel

One question that we get a lot of at YC is how to find a technical co-founder. This is how I would think through this problem. First, I would start with your friends.

Um, how many of your friends do you really enjoy talking to and who know how to write code? And even better, write code every day as a primary part of their job. I advise that you actually make a list of all of these people, ranked the top five, and then make those people real offers.

A lot of what happens is that people have friends they might want to start companies with, but they feel uncomfortable asking. They think, "Oh, well my friend works at Google, or he makes this big salary, or she's capped up for a promotion. I don't think they're ever gonna want to do it." If you don't ask, you'll never know.

And your friend might be a job waiting to leave, but no one's asking them. Or let's be more clear; their friend isn't asking them to come and let's start something. The part of asking someone to start a company, though, is to make them an offer.

Like, how much salary can you pay them, if anything? How much equity are you willing to give them? So you don't want to just have an informal conversation; you actually want to make them a real offer.

"Hey Samantha, I'd like you to be my co-founder. I'd like to give you 40% of the company. We've only raised a small amount of money, so I can't afford to pay you much, but as soon as we raise more, I'm happy to pay you this salary." That’s what it takes—a real offer. Not like, "Hey, can you help me with my project on the weekends?" or, "Hey, would you be interested?" or, "Hey, would you just go do this on the side for me?" Everyone's asking engineers to do that type of work, and it's often not a very good way to recruit a technical co-founder.

Okay, after we work through friends, let's say that no one on the list says yes, or you can't build a list because you're not friends with people who know how to write code. Then that’s good.

What to think about is co-workers. Go through the same exact process with the people that you work with at work. People you like, people you get along with. Figure out who they are, make a list, and you make real offers.

Now let’s say no one at work and knowing your friends. The next thing you have to think about is, how do I build a network with software engineers in it? The often best way to do this is to go get another job, to go work at a technology company where software engineers work.

Now a lot of times people go down this route. They think, "Oh, I used to work at a big company like Google or Facebook." Unfortunately, if you're not technical, a lot of the time when you work at these big companies, you are kept far away from engineering, and so it’s a lot harder to become friends with engineers.

So, counter-intuitively, or maybe intuitively, depending on how you think about it, the best way to build an engineering network and become friends with more engineers is to work at a technology startup. You know, to work at a small company that’s 50 people or less, where everyone’s sitting together, talking together, having lunch together, and interacting with each other and doing work together.

By making friends with those co-workers and by making friends with their friends, you'll start building your network, and you can start figuring out who you might consider working with. Now sometimes that does take longer; it might take a year or two working at that company before you have the network and you find the people you want to work with.

But remember, doing a startup can be a whole life's work. So if it takes a couple years to get started, then in the scheme of things, if this is something you’re doing for 10 plus years, that's probably worth it.

One more thing that you can consider is learning how to code. There are a lot more recent resources online right now that can help you learn how to code, everything from Codecademy to Lambda School and a whole bunch of other products. So you can always go that direction if you’re inclined.

One last note before I close: If you're a college student, one thing you should understand is that one of the best places to find future co-founders is in college. By all means, if you ever think that you might want to create a startup one day and you don’t know how to code, one thing I'd advise you to do is make friends with people who are learning how to code in school. They might turn out to be your future co-founder one, two, five, or ten years from now.

I was extremely lucky. I was friends with Justin Kan in college. He was working; he was learning how to code and working in a startup. And he was friends with a guy named Emmett Shear, who was a great software engineer. When they decided to do a company called Justin.tv, I was friends with them, they recruited me, and bam! I had two amazing co-founders directly from school.

College is a massively, massively used opportunity to find co-founders, and you shouldn’t forget that. Thank you very much!