HN Explorer

Looking for a co-founder? post here (3 rules apply)

31 points by sharpshoot ↗ HN
Ok with all the cofounder finding going on. I thought i'd start a useful thread.

There are 3 rules

1. Put in your location in the comments 2. If there is someone in your local area looking for a cofounder meet them this weekend. 3. Not too much spiel - keep it fairly enigmatic

Three rules. Go forth and conquer..

95 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread
burnout1540
Okay, I'll start. I'm 24 and living in San Francisco. I'm a programmer but would like to find another technical person to work with. I have three ideas for a startup:

1. An easy software solution for multivariate testing web pages. 2. A bid management tool for PPC. I'm thinking something like www.efrontier.com, but for small and medium sized businesses. 3. Totally different from the top two, but I'm interested in a personalized (or well-balanced) news site. Findory would be the best comparison. Of course, it failed, so I am a little bit hesitant and I think relying on advertising as your only revenue source is very risky. If you're interested in the latest technology that could be used in this area, check out http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/sh.pdf

My email address is in my profile.

cperciva
My email address is in my profile.

The email address in your profile is only visible to you and the YC management.

burnout1540
Ahhh well now I feel stupid. My email address is npomara at gmail
cawel
Then, when editing one's HN profile, it could indicate it better (whether the info is shown publicly or not).
dcurtis
But News.YC prides itself on having both a terrible user interface and a terrible user experience.

What kind of site calls a feature "noprocrast" without giving any detailed information about what it does? Only news.yc!

--edit

I wonder why I am being modded down. Maybe I said it too sarcastically. News.YC really does have a terrible interface. Look at the account settings page-- imagine yourself as a user who has never been there before. It's confusing and poorly documented. I love this site for the content and the simplicity, but Paul Graham is a programmer and spent very little time on the user experience, which makes sense. I don't blame him.

But it is still a bad interface. I'm pretty sure 99% of people who fill out the "email" field expect their email to somehow be visible to other users. It's right next to another field that IS visible.

dkokelley
Think of it as a filter for non-technical types.
DaniFong
Shiny graphics do not a user experience make.
dcurtis
Of course not. Craigslist has an amazing masterpiece of an interface and uses no icons/pictures at all.
DaniFong
There seems to be some disagreement over what we mean by 'user interface' and 'user experience'. Those who downmodded you probably thought 'I like using YC news just fine thanks.'

When I hit the little ycn button on my dash, i'm immediately greeted with a list of interesting articles, flanked by comments that are worth reading. That's the most important part of the user experience for us, so here we stay.

dcurtis
Ah. The content here is great. I'm not denying that YC is awesome.

It just has a sub-par interface. Compared to other sites, it has a terrible UI. It's not very user friendly, and it could be much more so.

pg
What kind of site calls a feature "noprocrast" without giving any detailed information about what it does?

A site for the kind of people who'd try it to find out.

Actually, it is explained in News News (http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html), but maybe most people don't bother looking at that.

dkokelley
I honestly like it better without any explanation. It reminds us that HN is not for everyone, but only those who will actually dig to find stuff out. I googled those features after I joined to learn about them, and I like it better that way.
pg
Yeah, I'll add a note about that.
anewaccountname
By the way, while we are on this topic--can you confirm that passwords are not stored in plain-text?
pg
Sure. You can see for yourself in the source: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc1.tar
brett
On disk at least. They're temporarily logged to memory in the clear:

  (def good-login (user pw ip)
    (let record (list (seconds) ip user pw)
      (if (and user pw (aand (shash pw) (is it (hpasswords* user))))
          (do (unless (user->cookie* user) (cook-user user))
              (enq-limit record good-logins*)
              user)
          (do (enq-limit record bad-logins*)
              nil))))
It might be good to pull the pw out of the record list:

  ...
   (let record (list (seconds) ip user)
     ...
pg
Ok, I took it out. Turns out nothing later ever needs the pw anyway.
jsjenkins168
I hope you are not reusing an important password for this site.. Even if they are hashed on the disk, they are sent insecurely to the server when you log in.
mcmahon
i just spent past 7 years working with companies doing your #1 & #2 ideas. i'm a product mgr, not a programmer person so I am happy to share with you my perspective. send me an email:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mgmcmahon mgmcmahon at gmail

powerflex
I'm 30 in San Francisco. For your first idea, if you are talking about website "performance survey" / "A/B" type testing then you have some wicked competition based out of SF.

I agree that advertising is not the way to go. However end users have demonstrated that they are not very willing to pay for services unless its to meet girls ;)

Corporate, on the other hand, doesn't seem to want anything for free...

burnout1540
Yes, there's definitely a lot of competition for the website testing idea and it would've been nice to start on it a few years ago. But I think that a fragmented market is an entrepreneur's best friend. There is no industry giant that you will always be compared to and will be crushed by. More importantly, a fragmented market also indicates that there is money to be made.
powerflex
I don't know what you have been considering doing with testing, but off the top of my head I don't know of anyone doing content A/B testing (ie: which version of content is more effective). I would expect to see a more granular, dynamic approach in website verbiage as NLP matures. For example, at my day job they argue semantics endlessly. Tailoring a websites' grammar to the user could increase effectiveness. This is an area I consider fascinating and wouldn't mind chatting more about it off line if you like.
gscott
I need a person into writing copy. If you like to write articles, sales text, web page copy please let me know. Click on "gscott" to see what I am doing and where it is going.
dizm
I'm in the Los Angeles area. Mainly looking for an interface graphics designer, but anyone else could be interesting. Doing work in Seaside. phil at dizm.com
carpal
24 living in Atlanta. Working on an accounting suite for small businesses called Aloe. Very very raw pre-alpha quality build up at http://aloe-acct.com

Looking for someone who can kick ass and take names. A Rails developer would be great, but I'm also looking for someone who has business chops and a good understanding of accounting principles.

Todd
I've been working on a similar concept on and off for almost a year. It's on the shelf right now, but I wouldn't mind talking. I've done a lot of research into Oracle and Peoplesoft and (to a lesser degree) Peachtree and Quick Books. If nothing else, I could share some insights on database schema, etc. tl @nospam@ onlyshallow.com
dkokelley
While I'm not sure how well HN works as a co-founder-finder (confoundit), I'll test the waters. :P

19 living in Santa Clarita, CA (just north of Los Angeles). Contact info, as well as stuff I've done is available in my profile.

fergusom
Three liberating real-world app ideas on the table. Atlanta, 30.Two successful ventures under belt. Looking for young-ish, VP of Engineering to partner / co-found / code third.
carpal
"Real-world app ideas"

Elaborate?

sharpshoot
If you wish to ask questions - get in touch & meet. Keep it enigmatic.
fergusom
"Real world" is probably better described as tools & apps that will dramatically change the way non-technical people do business. Email me at fergusom@yahoo.com
derivative
I'm 28 in Atlanta as well and have been tinkering with a couple of ideas. Started a company back in college about five years ago in the CRM tech support space, but failed due to lack of expertise in marketing.

I'm not really interested in doing anything web-based though since my background is mainly desktop Windows development in C# for a few years now. If anyone's interested in talking to see if there might be some synergy shoot me an e-mail.

ph0rque
Hailing from State College, PA (home of Penn State) here. Working on an app that aims to be a one-stop shop for open source learning: a cross between Wikipedia (for students) and SourceForge (for teachers); with courses, lectures, classes, and tutorials that anyone can create, edit and use.

Unfortunately, I was an absolute noob when I came up with the idea ~8 months ago, so I am learning as I go along (ironically, what I really need is something like ezLearnz to help accelerate my learning). As such, progress is slower than I expected; I hoped to have launched ezLearnz by February, but I still have some development to do. Hopefully, the launch will occur within a week, give or take a few days, at http://beta.ezlearnz.com . I'm developing in RoR, so a RoR developer would be ideal.

My contact details are in my (public) profile.

danw
sharpshoot: What's the reasoning behind Rule 3: 'Keep it enigmatic'?

I'm in Bristol, UK if anyone wishes to get in touch.

serhei
Guessing: you have to be serious enough about actually co-founding something that you're willing to meet people in person to get opportunities.
bluelu
Switzerland, Luxembourg or inbetween ;)

25, university degree, looking for a cofounder with experience in natural language processing and clustering of documents (like http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/sh.pdf someone else posted below). Preferentially Java. Idea is blog search related.

Tichy
I am in Munich and would be interested to meet.
davidw
And I'm in Innsbruck. I'll remember to look you up if I'm in Munich again - feel free to come down here to visit some time for day of hiking or skiing or something.

bluelu - where in .ch? I am in Zurich sort of regularly on business these days.

Tichy
Good idea, it's very likely that I'll be near Innsbruck sometime this year. If you stay there - I remember you want to relocate?

What about Zurich, btw., I think there are plenty of jobs there (mostly in banking...).

bluelu
I live in Zurich. Maybe we can meet for a dring sometime soon. I will contact both of you.
davidw
I guess so, because you don't have any information at all in your profile.
chris_l
Hi, I have worked on blog search in the past, you can find me on skype as chrislaux if you want to discuss ideas etc.
cstejerean
I'm not exactly looking for a co-founder but I'm looking to meet smart people with interesting ideas. I like working on interesting projects whether it's my idea or someone else's. I'm located in Chicago (for now).
jdavid
Milwaukee, WI - We will be at techcocktail 7, you should come find us. we want to meet people that like to work on fun projects.
wokiko
I got some interesting ideas. What is it you do? I'm in Indianapolis and have a couple sites. http://www.cornbrain.com and another which I'm developing.
duke
1. México. Will move as needed to get text twext.

2. Este fin de semana en San Miguel de Allende. La semana que entra en México, D.F. para http://consol.org.mx, buscando programador para http://twext.com/gig

3. http://twext.com/overview wants great hacker to add value to unicode texts by formatting them twext. Why? So we can more easily learn natural language like Español, Français, Português, etc etc. So we can communicate better. Twext text works on computers and prints on paper. Today, a billion people are learning English.

a.) http://olpcnews.com/content/localization/learning_language.h...

b.) http://more.read.fm/more_language#why.3F

4. Spiel: Lisp?

asisproperty
I'm a technology entrepreneur in Provo, UT. I'm starting a "master-mind" group here with other entrepreneurs, business owners, or executives of start-up's. I want to keep it to under 10 people for now. If you're not familiar with the master-mind concept, it's where entrepreneurs sit down all (in our case Saturday once a month) day and brainstorm on eachothers' business ideas.

John D. Rockefeller attributed most of his success to his frequent master-mind meetings with other business owners. In fact, 90% of what we now know as Rockefeller's achievements came after Thomas Edison joined his master-mind group.

If you are interested, send me an email and include your phone number: adammichaelc@gmail.com

sharpshoot
so you aren't looking for a cofounder? Then i don't think this is relevant on this thread.
edw519
1 man band in Tampa. Wouldn't mind teaming with a LAMP / AJAX rock star. Here's what I'm doing...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114568

rms
Do you need a drummer?
aston
Do you play?
rms
Lately, just Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I'll pick up a decent electronic kit one of these days though.
thinkcomp
I'm in Palo Alto, California. I'm 24, I've been running my company for 10 years, and I'm looking for someone who knows how to sell the products I already have to people. Or, if you'd like to help code new ones, that would be cool, too.
rosy720
Looking for a Lead Developer for the coolest new music site. We're 2 fun, music obsessed girls looking for the right engineer to make our great idea a reality. We're located in San Francisco. email rose at imthemusic dot com
michaelr
If anyone in western Canada (Calgary, Alberta) would like to toss around some ideas send me an email (see profile).
JesseAldridge
I know pg says you need co-founders, but I have a feeling that partnering with a stranger will hurt your chances of success more than it will help. I remember Jessica saying a major cause of death in startups was founder disputes (link: http://www.grid7.com/archives/189_podcast-28-jessica-livings..., around the 14 minute mark).
sharpshoot
how do you turn a stranger into a partner? You try working together and see if it works out...

What's the reason you don't have a cofounder? because you haven't done what's stated above.

apexauk
I co-founded our startup after reading an ad for a hacker and convincing the other guy to take me on as a partner instead of employee - we met for the first time 2 years ago to talk about the startup that would be, today we've got an angel-backed team. Meet new people and start work with them - it can work, you'll soon find out if it doesn't. Keep in mind looking for people with complimentary qualities though - I put our success 100% down to how we each have a responsibility for well-defined "halves" of the company - me product & tech, him sales, marketing, community, legal, biz dev etc.
sharpshoot
right on. Jesse's excuses above can be attributed to a lack of balls in changing his situation.

Don't sit on the fence. Make stuff happen. This president's day weekend is finding a cofounder weekend...

davidw
I have similar suspicions... the best co-founders seem to be people that were already good friends or partners in something, so it's sort of a catch-22: if you don't already have that person in place, rushing out to try and find someone is certainly not going to find you anyone that you've known for a long time...
kajecounterhack
Just never forget the derek powazek and JPG mag episode...
memius
i'm a programmer fresh out of college in bergen, norway (planning to relocate to boston or bay area). i'm 34, and i'm building a neural network to do speech to text. i need another programmer, preferrably someone with more experience than myself, especially with browsers and low-level signal processing.
aggieben
with browsers and low-level signal processing

wow. Those are quite divergent worlds, I should say. You may be looking for two people.

duke
speech to text interests me because SLS (same language subtitling) now helps many in india learn to read..

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/same-language-subtitl...

synxi theory: with tools to easily sync/caption youtube, kaltura, etc, we can make a fun way to learn/teach each other language, (ie engelsk, spansk, norsk, etc)

alaskamiller
It's nice to make friends but this isn't how you start up companies
edw519
From the responses on this page you appear to be correct.

What would you suggest?

alaskamiller
The pairings that are made today would be best to apply for future cycles later in the year. Most people here you talk to will at best end up as an employee in your eyes, it's going to be hard to treat them as equals when most people are just throwing out soft skills they want filled.

My partner and I have known each other since high school but he went off to college while I went into the military. After reconnecting we've been working on small projects on and off for the past couple cycles to learn each others quirks, styles, and most importantly trust.

And after attending our 5 year high school reunion it's really surprising that people we haven't talked to in awhile turned out to be doing very similar tech things as well, even if they're not in the area. It surely doesn't hurt to look up Facebook some old friends and see what they're doing or what they're working on. Maybe some hate big corporate culture as much as we all do here.

A better way would be for people to list out their work experiences or market they're analyzing for their startup.

For example, one of the failed ideas I was researching for was event planning and building an evite competitor. After 4 months I dropped it but I've kept plenty of notes about trends, other websites, feature lists, specs, and so forth. If anyone wants to discuss it feel free to get in touch with me at alaska.miller@gmail.com. I also worked at a big corporation working with CMS tools, search tools, publication, enterprise software for PLM processes. If you want to build software to optimize those fields, again, get in touch with me.

Likewise my current idea is dealing with Flash video and Flex environment, and accessibility. If anyone has experience with that, please email me.

Start emailing people and sharing with them your ideas for feedback, then ask them for another referral to someone else you can talk to until you've literally have no one left to talk to. I've been keeping track of all my conversations and people of interest in iCal and 37s Highrise and building my business network. I'm also inviting local people to lunch to pick their brains.

But it's completely youthful naivety to think this is the right way to cofound a business together.

edw519
Thanks. Already been doing some of what you suggest. This just looked like an interesting thread.

In the meantime, back to work.

alaskamiller
I've even got you stored in my little database as the ERP guy
edw519
Thanks. I never thought of describing myself that way, but who knows, maybe I can find 2 chicks who dig it.
apexauk
"But it's completely youthful naivety to think this is the right way to cofound a business together."..

Perhaps not the ideal way, if you already have a big database of contacts you should probably go through that first, yes. But I co-founded our company after meeting a guy I didn't know previously who had advertised for a hacker to do some contract work (as I said elsewhere on this thread) and 2 years later the company's doing great.. Don't rule out this as a possibility, basically.

latrokles
Miami, FL... 25. Doing hardware stuff...
pretzel
I am going to be in Leeds, UK in 2 months time working on a p2p database/webserver. If you are interested, around the UK, and know Java, let me know!
neilcauldwell
Pretzel - I'd be interested in meeting up. Graduated from Leeds last summer, and I've been scrambling round in the startup world since.

Anyone else from the UK, let me know. The Songkick guys held a UK hackers meetup last year, so we're probably due for another one soon. Maybe we could do one in Stratford-Upon-Avon?!

danw
Theres BarCamp Brighton in a few weeks which will be attended by a load of smart hackers. I suggest you check it out if looking for a cofounder: http://www.barcampbrighton.org/
kirubakaran
I am not exactly looking for a co-founder right now but I'd definitely like to make friends with ppl with startuppy interests.

Location: Seattle, WA.

(Proximity not a requirement)

zenlinux
I live in southeast New Hampshire, about an hour and a half drive from Boston. I'm interested in meeting people who are involved with the intersection of political activism and technology. I'm working on a web application to help grassroots groups run letter writing campaigns and various other activities. I enjoy working with Ruby and Rails and also run the NHRuby.org user group. Drop me a line at sgarman at zenlinux dot com.
[deleted]
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wmeredith
Wade Meredith, 26, Kansas City

Graphic design, GUI, CSS+HTML, SEO, Blogging, Viral Marketing

wademeredith.com <---portfolio site/contact me here.