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hi I'm cat mini Alec and I'm a partner at Y Combinator I've been at YC for five years now and I've seen about 1,300 companies go through the program today I'm going to answer the question how do I meet a co-founder first I'm going to
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talk about whether you even need a co-founder second we'll talk about where some of the top YC companies where their co founding teams met third we'll talk about what we look for at YC when we're looking at Co founding teams and finally
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we'll talk a little bit about how you might want to split your equity possible to start a really successful company as a solo founder 12% of the companies we funded in the last batch we're started by a solo founder but if you look at the top 50 companies by evaluation you'll see that only three of them we're started by solo founders so you can start a really successful company as a solo founder but it's hard having a co-founder gives you someone
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not only to split tasks with but someone to split the emotional burden of starting a company with I looked at YC companies with a valuation of over a hundred million and among that population about half of those teams met in school mostly during their undergrad years after that about 20 percent of the teams met at work and then after that about 16 percent of the teams were introduced by mutual friends I also looked at our population of
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female founders that we funded to see if women meet their co-founders in a different way of that population about 33 percent of those teams met at school about 20 percent of them met at work and just under 10 percent met at events the
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easiest way to meet a potential co-founder is through school or work and that makes sense because you have context ideally you've gotten to see a that person perform you've built respect for their work over time and hopefully
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you've worked on a project together so you know whether you work together well as a team and how well you communicate first we'd like to see well-balanced teams we like to see teams that can both build the product that they are pitching
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us and teams that can sell teams that can communicate clearly and succinctly what it is they're building second we'd like to see teams that have been working together for a little while I think you'd be surprised by how many people
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apply to I see with people that they just met a couple weeks ago we like to see that you've worked on something together in the past we want to see some evidence that your team will stick together for the long haul ideally you've come up with the idea together and you've been working together on building the product since the start but even if one co-founder came up with the idea and brought the second co-founder on six months later we
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still like to see an even equity split assuming that the average time to IPO our exit is about 8 to 10 years this means the vast majority of your company's life is in the future and we like to make sure that all the co-founders on a team feel like they're equally invested and equally ready to work really hard full time for at least eight to ten years if you're not willing to give a potential co-founder equal equity it might be worth considering
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whether the the right person to bring on the team and if someone is asking you to be a co-founder and to come on board their team but they're not willing to give you a equal equity you might question whether that person is really
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going to value your contributions so to sum it up 94% of the top YC companies have co-founders and typically they met at school or work and if you're thinking about bringing on a co-founder we love to see teams that have an equal equity split