Almost every guide to finding a cofounder is a guide to finding a skill. Technical, business, design. Skill is the easiest thing on the list to check and the least likely thing to end the company.
What ends companies is well documented, and it is worth starting there, because it changes what you screen for.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
Noam Wasserman at Harvard Business School studied more than ten thousand founders for The Founder's Dilemmas and found that 65 percent of high-potential startups fail because of conflict inside the founding team. The other 35 percent covers everything people normally worry about: the product, the technology, the market.
His three sources of that conflict are relationships, roles and rewards. Founding with friends or family without ever setting boundaries. Never deciding who actually makes the call. Splitting equity in a good mood, early, with no vesting.
Read that list again and notice that none of it is a skills question. Every item is something you could have talked about in the first fortnight and probably did not, because it was awkward and the momentum felt good.
Five things, and the answers matter more than whether they are the answers you wanted.
How many months of personal runway do you each have. Not how committed you feel, how many months. A cofounder with four months and a cofounder with three years are on different companies already.
How many hours a week, in reality, next month. Say the number out loud, including the contract work neither of you has mentioned.
Who decides when you disagree and cannot resolve it. Somebody has to, and picking that person while you still agree is far easier than picking them during the argument.
What does a good outcome look like in five years. Wasserman's other finding is that founders quietly split into wanting to be rich and wanting to be in charge, and those two people make opposite decisions about raising money and hiring a chief executive.
And equity, with vesting and a cliff, written down. A four-year vest with a one-year cliff is the standard for a reason: it is the mechanism that stops a founder who leaves in month five from owning a third of the company forever.
Before you commit anything, build one small thing together against a real deadline that somebody outside will see.
A weekend project with a demo at the end teaches you more than ten coffees. You find out how they behave at hour nine when it does not work, whether they finish, whether they tell you early that they will be late, and whether you enjoy the last two hours or endure them.
Coffees select for people who are good at coffees. That is a real skill and it is not the one you are hiring for.
The dedicated route is real and worth using. Y Combinator's cofounder matching has made over a hundred thousand matches, and the hubs are more concentrated than people expect: roughly 3,200 active founders in San Francisco, 3,000 in New York, 2,900 in London and 1,900 in Bangalore. If you are in one of those cities and you like filtering profiles, start there.
The part it cannot do is reach the person who is not looking on a cofounder site. Plenty of the right people are heads-down in a job, in a research group or in another country, and they never make a founder profile.
Notapub works from the other end. You write the gap in plain words. "Solo technical founder, working payments product, 40 users paying, I cannot sell and I need somebody who can." That sentence is matched to people whose own words line up, and they hear about you rather than you working through a directory. It keeps being matched after you close the app, so somebody who decides to leave their job in October is still brought to you.
If you want to think it through out loud first, you can call. Nora is a voice, not a person, and she says so. She spends about fifteen minutes getting the gap out of you in words that are worth sending, which is most of the work in a cofounder ask.
Undefined decision rights, mismatched runway and hours, and equity split early with no vesting. Wasserman put team conflict at 65 percent of failures among high-potential startups.
Maybe, but not on day one and never without vesting. The split matters far less than the cliff and the schedule that protect both of you if one of you leaves.
You say what you are building and the gap you need filled, and the people whose own words line up are brought to you. Free on iPhone, Android and the web.