How to find best co-founders

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription – In this video let's talk about the ideal founding team for your business and it's kind of the you know question and the funny question of like how many people does it take to a screw in a light bulb well it depends if you're just starting a home-based business she's probably gonna be just you do not you don't need a founding team most home-based businesses they tend to be automated the marketing tends to be automated and you are sort of the you know there's not that much money to be made to split up on a whole team and it's not particularly investable so it's just you keeping all the revenue the interesting this conversation gets interesting when you talk about startups that are investable think uber think mobile apps and traditionally they are started there you need co-founders if you're looking for investors investors will specifically asked you about your founding team and it's a little bit of a yellow flag if you are the only person so traditional startup teams are 2 to 3 people 3 is ideal because they're tech heavy at least one or two people should be working on the technology side and one is the business per business and marketing person and what's very important is that the skill sets are complementary not overlapping if you have friends obviously who do the same thing as you is very easy to invite them into your company but you are just gonna overlap in skillsets it is just not gonna be that helpful so there's a helpful resource for this it's called founder dating calm I'll show you that website in a second and just be careful because Paul Graham of Y Combinator who's seen over hundreds of very successful startups and startup teams some of which have gone on to have become like billion-dollar companies he notes he's widely quoted in that the biggest problem he sees in founding teams is that they've never worked together before and the biggest success stories happen when founding teams are made up of people who have successfully worked on projects before maybe they've worked in companies before to get there and then they quit those companies and they go on to do a start-up or something like that because if you would never work with someone before what happens is you start discovering all their flaws and the different ways in which they like to work that's different from you and all the ways you guys are incompatible after you've signed the paperwork after you've you know got into business together and it's very hard to part ways and sometimes that actually kills the company so you want to be very careful and test people out with whom you want to get into business with maybe by doing small projects or just maybe instead of partnering with them if they have a specific skill set you instead want to hire them cheaply as a contractor and then maybe later bring them on as a co-founder if they really have good chemistry with you so definitely keep that in mind because Paul Graham he's definitely he's one of the authoritative voices in the startup industry so he's very good to listen to him and if you are looking for co-founders and you're desperate for it let's go over that founder dating website here we are as you can see its founder dating dot-com you can join you can see that they actually recently joined forces with something called co-founders lab which is another thing for co-founders and it's they're based in Silicon Valley and they help people network with co-founders advisors mentors so it's actually more than just co-founders and eventually you know you can network your way up to talking to some investors as well so try the site if you're really looking for somebody to join your team but really first look at people you've worked with before and see if there's anyone there that might be a good fit.