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How to Find the Right Co-founder
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In this Startup School lecture, YC Partner Harj Taggar shares advice on how to find the right co-founder for your startup. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8h-how-to-find-the-right-co-founder This lecture is part of YC's Startup School, a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Introduction 0:25 Why have a co-founder at all? 3:43 Starting without a co-founder 7:10 What to look for 11:13 What about skills? 13:38 Where to look for a co-founder 20:18 Making the leap 22:36 Deciding equity 24:40 Who's the CEO? 27:28 Formalizing things Looking for a co-founder? Try YC's new co-founder matching platform: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching
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Introduction
"[Music] hi i'm han stagger and i'm partner at white community and today i'm going to be talking about what i think are to be the most important part of starting a company which is finding the right co..."
Why have a co-founder at all?
"well i think there's three main reasons you really want a co-founder when you're starting a company the first is productivity you can get a lot more work done if you have someone to divide the work up..."
Starting without a co-founder
"okay so hopefully i've convinced you that you really do want a co-founder when you're starting a company but what if you're really keen to get started on a company right now and you don't have a co-fo..."
What to look for
"so when you're thinking about bringing on a co-founder what should you be looking for in them well i actually think the single most important thing to know about someone before you start a company wit..."
What about skills?
"you're probably wondering i'm talking about what you should look for in co-founders and i haven't mentioned the obvious thing which is what skills do they have so it's obviously really important to ha..."
Where to look for a co-founder
"so where should you look for to find co-founders well the answer here is a little obvious it's to start with the people you already know so ideally your friends and colleagues and kind of ironically t..."
Making the leap
"so once you've found a potential co-founder how do you test out and know for sure that you both want to start a company together before making having the final commitment well it's not a perfect proce..."
Deciding equity
"uh first is the equity split right like who earns how much of the company now i think the way to think about this is your default equity allocation should really be 50 50 um that's where you want to s..."
Who's the CEO?
"really want to decide is who's the ceo now this can sometimes be an uncomfortable conversation um and to be honest it's actually i think a bit of a red flag if it is an uncomfortable conversation and ..."
Formalizing things
"formalize things and formalizing really means the legal act of incorporating a company um setting up a vesting agreement this is really important investing means that the shares in the company you don..."