How To Find A Co-Founder with Harj Taggar | Startup School

**Harj Taggar** (0:09)
Hey, everyone, I'm Harj Taggar. I'm one of the group partners here at Y Combinator. And today, I'm gonna talk about co-founders. We're gonna cover why do you even need a co-founder, when's the right time to bring on a co-founder, and where can you find them. Let's start with talking about why should you have a co-founder at all. I think there are three reasons. The first, building a successful startup is an incredibly hard thing to do, and there is a huge amount of work to be done.
You are trying to take your idea, make it a reality, and compete with companies that have hundreds of employees and have been around for many, many years. And you really can't do that alone. You need someone else there who, at a basic level, can just get more work done with you. Two people always more working hours per day than one. But also, having a good co-founder improves the quality of your work. So, if you have a co-founder with complementary skill sets, they can do things that you can't, right? If you have a co-founder who's smart, they can challenge your ideas. They can talk you out of bad ones and help you find good ones. That's why it's really important to have a co-founder just so that you can get good, high-quality work done at the rate you need to be successful. The second reason, startups are a real emotional roller coaster. You have moments where you think you're going to take over the world, and moments where you're convinced you're about to die. And having a great co-founding relationship can be a huge source of support in a way that no one else can, right? Because your co-founder ideally should be someone who's all in on the startup in the same way that you are, and when you're having bad moments, they can bring you up, and you can do the same for them. And that's an important reason why you can't just hire people or have people join your startup once it's already successful, to get the true benefits of co-founders. You need someone who's all in and invested in the same way you are. And the final reason is simply pattern matching. If you look at the most successful startups in history, they all had co-founding teams. And we don't always realize this, because once a startup becomes successful, it's common for some founders to leave, and one founder, especially the CEO, to become well-known, famous, and associated with the startup, right? If we go through some examples, Facebook, one of the biggest companies in the world, is really now known as Mark Zuckerberg's company, but he actually co-founded it with Dustin Moskovitz. If you think of Apple, it's of course known as Steve Jobs' company, and very rightly so, but Steve Jobs literally couldn't have built the first Apple computer if he didn't have Steve Wozniak as his co-founder. So hopefully I've convinced you that you really want a co-founder to improve your odds of success if you want to start a startup. But let's say you feel ready to go now, and you really want to start a company, but you don't have a great co-founder in mind yet. Should you start the company anyway, or should you wait until you have a co-founder? I think again, in 90% of the cases, you should really spend all of your efforts in trying to find a great co-founder to start a company with. But I do think in 10% of the cases, there's some exceptions. I think the biggest exception is if you meet two conditions. One, you have a very specific idea you want to work on that you're very passionate about, and you have some domain experience that makes you really uniquely qualified to work on that idea. Said another way, if you have an idea that you have really high conviction about that solving a real problem because you've got some experience that makes you an expert on the problem, and you're an engineer and you can start building it, you can make progress without requiring a technical co-founder, then I think it's fair for you to get going, start the company, build the first version of the product, and bring a co-founder on as you start making some progress and traction. If you're not an engineer, I don't think you can do this, and I think you should really focus your time on trying to find a great technical co-founder to start the company with. Okay, so let me give you an example of when Y Combinator funded a single founder that worked out really well. It was Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox. So Drew applied to YC as a single founder, and he was actually initially rejected and told to go get a co-founder.