Intro

As a follow-up to my last piece, a retrospective on the most recent chapter of my founder journey, Iā€™m looking back at my failed attempts in recruiting a cofounder. Not for lack of intentionality or trying. Iā€™ve done a lot of co-founder ā€œdatingā€ over the last year, applying rigor in strategy and tactics. So much so, I have a an embarrasingly detailed CRM for tracking purposes, rich with interactions. The effort I put into the search fluctuated over the year, and spiked during months where I committed to doing it intensely. Despite the investment so far, I havenā€™t found the right match yet. To improve my odds, Iā€™ve done some quick-and-dirty data mining over my CRM to tease out usable insights to inform my search process.

Methods

Iā€™m not going to enumerate my recruiting strategy in detail (once Iā€™ve landed on an approach that works, Iā€™ll release it as a guide), but here are some key elements you need to grasp in order to contextualize the lessons.

Ideal Cofounder Profile

These are the essential traits Iā€™m looking for in a cofounder ā€“ Traits I use to filter prospects:

  • Already a full-time founder or ready to make the leap within the next 3 months (not conditioned on a raise).
  • Prefers in-person collaborating and is located in San Francisco, or can move to San Francisco within the next 3 months.
  • Interested in exploring domains where I have pre-existing knowledge, or can attain it quickly (~3 months).
  • Weā€™re both pre-idea, looking for early co-founders.

While not a hard prerequisite, I have a borderline requirement for someone technical. Thereā€™s a series of other preferences as well but theyā€™re not germane to this analysis.

Funnel

After I source my candidates, I run each cofounder prospect through my dating funnel consisting of the following stages:

  1. Screening (~30 min. meeting): This is my quick way of judging whether thereā€™s mutual vibes and we fit each otherā€™s cofounder profile. If I donā€™t detect any red flags, I proceed to the next stage.
  2. Deep-Dive (2-3 meetings): This gives us a chance to go deep on background, founder motivations, domains of interest, working style, etc. Itā€™s also an opportunity to complete one of the many co-founder questionnaires out there and review each otherā€™s responses. If donā€™t uncover any obvious incompatibilities, I move to the next stage.
  3. Trial (1 week - 1 month): This is meant to be a simulation of a cofoundership. We choose to work together on some self-contained project with a clearly-defined target (eg. get feedback on a prototype from X users). You get so much more data on the person and their work style this way, and either party can terminate the simulation at any point. Iā€™ve also used this time to do a reference check on the other person.

If we survive these stages, then the next step is to commit and establish a more formal collaboration.

CRM Stats

In total, my CRM has a whopping 215 entries. Thatā€™s 215 unique propsects that I interacted with. This includes a combination of candidates that reached out to me (21%), plus candidates I reached to (79%).

I filled my CRM with leads from 5 different sources:

  • The YC co-founder matching platform: The equivalent of a dating app, but for co-founders.
  • LinkedIn: Cold connecting and messaging founders who list ā€˜Stealth Startupā€™ (or something similar) as their current company.
  • Personal network: This includes people I know directly and people in my extended network.
  • AI Tinkerers: A community of AI builders.
  • Xooglers: Community of ex-Googlers.
Pie chart of co-founder lead sources

Insights

1) How many prospects?

In modern Western society, the first question you ask yourself when dating intentionally (Iā€™m talking romantically), how many dates should I expect to go on before meeting the ā€œoneā€? The co-founder dating world has a similar parallel. You want to know how many prospects you should expect to review before finding someone whoā€™s an excellent match. Although my co-founder search is ongoing and I expect this number to vary greatly across founders ā€“ depending on factors like your ICP and personal values ā€“ Iā€™ll share some guiding data points.

We can back into an approximate answer by looking at the funnel conversion rates.

Co-founder funnel chart of conversions

The chart shows rates calculated against the total quantity of candidates (eg. I had screening calls with 43.26% of the 215 candidates I considered). So roughly 2% of leads made it to the trial phase, or about 1 in 100. This is consistent with the numbers a fellow founder observed during his cofounder search, where it took him roughly 100 candidates to home in on a cofounder.

All this implies, you can expect to run through ~100 candidates to find one thatā€™s worthy of a co-founder trial.

Before moving on, a key observation: The bottom-of-funnel conversions differ widely across the different lead sources.

Co-founder bottom-of-funnel chart of conversions, broken apart by source

You can see that on one end, LinkedIn percipitated a total of 0 trial candidates, and on the other end, my personal network yielded a high percentage of trial candidates. That said, varied recruiting channels adds a great deal of nuance to this question.

2) Where should I look for a cofounder?

Referencing the last chart, its obvious that where you hunt matters. Channels like LinkedIn, which give you access to a large cascade of potential recruits, also exposes you to a lot of noisy candidates. I donā€™t just mean mediocre. I also mean low-intent. If you donā€™t know the person beforehand, thereā€™s nothing on their LinkedIn profile that signals whether theyā€™re looking for a co-founder (unless they explicitly advertise it). I was DMā€™ing anybody who mentioned they were a founder of a stealth startup (or something akin to that) and discovered that most werenā€™t looking for a cofounder. Contrast that with YCā€™s co-founder platform: Even though you have access to a comparatively smaller pool (but still numbering in the 1000ā€™s), each match is almost guaranteed to be actively looking for a partner. In hindsight, my lack of success on LinkedIn was predicted by the tactic I deployed, but Iā€™m glad it was empirically verified. Nevertheless, the key insight is you want to fish where youā€™re chances of making quality catches is high, but you also want to fish where the catchā€¦errā€¦wants to be caught (to stretch the metaphor).

Another a priori belief confirmed by the data: My personal network offered the best denisty of quality, high-confidence candidates. This is not suruprising. Although, I mightā€™ve been bias. I could see myself being less scrutinizing and too trusting of these candidates because they came with social proof.

3) Why doesnā€™t it work out?

When an engagement with a potential recruit ends, I did my best to record the reason.

Pie chart of co-founder termination reasons.

Disclaimer: Take the results here with more than your usual grain of salt. The rationale I would log for each candidate consisted of only a single reason, when multiple reasons may have applied. And when I was the one being rejected, I canā€™t guarantee the honesty behind the reasons the other person reported.

Now, whether it was me initiating the breakup, or the other party, the proportions in the pie chart donā€™t change by much. The top reasons were consistent:

  1. Interest Mismatch: Misalignment in the industries or markets we wanted to explore.
  2. No Chemistry: This is my ā€œotherā€ category. When it simply didnā€™t click on a personal level ā€“ because of conflicting communication styles, different energy levels, or just a general lack of rapport ā€“ I would use this as the justification.
  3. Inexperienced: Aside from technical or business aptitude, being a founder is its own skill. A skill you acquire from experience. I dismissed candidates that seemingly lacked these founder skills, while also being too rigid in their disposition towards startups to pick them up quickly.
  4. Too Baked: These were people who were super high when I met themā€“No, Iā€™m kidding. These were candidates that already committed too deeply to a specific idea or direction, and made significant progress.

Apart from the last justification, these categories areā€¦pretty squishy. Theyā€™re based on subjective judgements. Itā€™s made me question whether Iā€™ve been inflexible with my interests, or too harsh in disqualifying people because they seemed to lack experience or because we didnā€™t have immediate chemistryā€¦

I also wanted to overlay these reasons across the stages of my funnel.

Stacked bar chart of co-founder termination reasons, broken down by stage.

Youā€™ll have to stare at this plot for a while before you can parse it, but hereā€™s the key takeaway: There were candidates dropping out of my pipeline at later, and costlier, stages, ie. Deep-Dive and Trial. I couldā€™ve weeded them out earlier. For instance, if someoneā€™s employed and committed to that path, or if someone is hedging their exploration of entrepreneurship by seeking out job opportunities, my qualification process shouldā€™ve been able to discover that earlier.

4) No means not now, not never

One of the more surprising, and encouraging, insights from my prolongued search was finding highly-compatible candidates that simply couldnā€™t join me because the timing wasnā€™t right. Whether theyā€™re facing an immigration barrier or simply needed more time to do some soul searching, Iā€™ve built a bench of people (14) who maybe ready to make the founder leap once their situation changes. For these candidates, I intend to keep the door open and maintain light contact.

Whatā€™s Next

Looking ahead, Iā€™m planning to update my cofounder search strategy in several ways:

  • Double-down on markets with ā€œhigh-intentā€ leads.
  • Revisit my methods for vetting active candidates, loosening my constraints on eg. mutual interest and entrepreneurial experience, and more aggressively sniffing out deal-breakers.
  • Nurture relationships with the promising candidates who werenā€™t ready to commit due to timing.
  • Visit other watering holes where I can connect with potential candidates, like emerging co-founder platforms, targeted networking events, and hackathons.
  • Reducing trial times. The fear of a large sunk cost is something I can feel inhibits me in advancing some candidates. I believe I can neutralize some of that concern by structuring shorter dry-runs.

Conclusion

The search continues. I remain more optimistic than ever.

If youā€™re looking for a cofounder and you think you align with my ICP, DM me on LinkedIn.