Keys To Successful Co-Founder Relationships with Cat Li & Divya Bhat | Startup School

**Cat Li** (0:09)
Good morning, everyone.
My name is Cat. I'm a software engineer here at YC, and I lead the startup school team. Today, I have visiting group partner Divya with me, and we're going to talk about everything relating to co-founders. So, what is a co-founder? Where do you find a co-founder? How do you evaluate a co-founder? And once you have one, how to work together.

**Divya Bhat** (0:26)
Thanks so much for having me, Cat.
I'm really excited to talk about this today, actually. Finding the right co-founder is arguably the most important part of starting a company. I've seen so many startups fail, or succeed, due to co-founder issues. And so I'm really glad we're doing this today.

**Cat Li** (0:41)
Yeah, and to start things off, let's clarify something. What do we mean by the word co-founder?

**Divya Bhat** (0:46)
Yeah, so quite literally, a co-founder is someone who starts your startup with you.
So when you apply to YC, we consider someone to be your co-founder if they have at least 10% equity. But in general, a co-founder is someone who is there from the beginning, or close to the beginning, who is building your company with you.

**Cat Li** (1:02)
So if I'm hardworking and smart, can I just start my startup alone?

**Divya Bhat** (1:05)
So yes, Cat, you're very hardworking and smart, and I don't doubt you.
The short answer is yes, you absolutely can. But it's really hard, like really, really hard. A startup is a very difficult journey for anyone, and doing it alone makes it more than twice as hard. And so we really recommend having a co-founder for the following reasons. So number one is productivity. So moving fast is critical in a startup. And when you have two people, three people, you can literally move two or three times as fast. You can just get so much more stuff done.
Additionally, your brainstorming can be higher quality, right? You can help each other see around corners.

**Cat Li** (1:42)
And bounce ideas off each other.

**Divya Bhat** (1:43)
Exactly. Kind of maybe not get into a rut with a bad idea, have someone checking.
Accountability is a little bit more effective when there's someone else there. You do your daily stand up and say, this is what I'm gonna get done today. And then there's someone there the next morning to ask you whether or not you did it.
And then I think moral support is another huge and sometimes overlooked component. So a startup has a lot of ups and downs. There's moments of optimism, there's moments of despair, and having someone that can both empathize with you but also balance you out in some of those scenarios can be just so helpful to keep moving.

**Cat Li** (2:14)
If you're not convinced by those theoretical reasons, it turns out that the empirical evidence also supports having a co-founder.
Most successful companies have been started by more than one founder. Even companies that are famous for only one of its founders actually had at least two. Microsoft, we all know Bill Gates, but Paul Allen was around for 10 years.

**Divya Bhat** (2:33)
Apple, so Steve Jobs is the face of Apple, but Steve Wozniak was the one who designed and built the Apple computer.
And little known fact, they actually had a third co-founder, Ronald Wayne. He left pretty early, but there were three of them in the beginning.

**Cat Li** (2:46)
Yeah, and Facebook, or I guess Meta now, if you've seen the social network, you'll know that Mark Zuckerberg had not one, not two, not three, but four co-founders.
So the list obviously goes on and on, but we also have some quantitative data to share. So while YC does fund solo founders, yes, we do, we do fund solo founders, of YC's top 100 companies, only four were founded by a solo founder.

**Divya Bhat** (3:09)
Are there really only four?

**Cat Li** (3:11)
Yeah, yep. And in those cases, there is a clear pattern among the solo founders as well. They are always able to make progress on their own.
So they built their own MVP, they got their own users, et cetera.

**Divya Bhat** (3:22)
Yeah, so I actually know some of these guys, they're exceptional.
And it's worth repeating then that while having a co-founder dramatically increases your chances of success, YC actually does fund solo founders. We believe that ultimately you are the best judge of whether having a co-founder is the right call for you.

**Cat Li** (3:38)
Yeah, absolutely.
But if you are convinced that you need a co-founder, let's talk about where to find one. Divya, any ideas?

**Divya Bhat** (3:45)
Yeah, so the obvious place to start is people that you know.