HN Explorer

Ask HN: How you did you meet your co-founder?

23 points by getAidlab ↗ HN
I am a bit curious how you guys did found your co-founder? College? Social media? Meetups?

The second question is: was it hard for you to convince him/her?

16 comments

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fillskills
Working together at a company 15 years ago. Friends since then.
Brainix
On OkCupid. Not even kidding.
osipovas
I started as an early employee and grew into a "co-founder".
alain94040
The best co-founder is someone you've already worked with and trust. Convincing should be pretty easy: you should both be excited about solving that one problem. If you are not brainstorming non-stop and messaging each other at all kinds of weird times, you don't have a co-founder.

[0] http://foundrs.com/find-a-cofounder

x0ner
Worked at the same company. Watched his workflow, built tools to speed it up. Years later, started a company around the same concept. Sold to a bigger company and spend our time moving that forward. Hit it off right away and are like brothers now.
tehlike
very nice. what were you guys developing? were you working on similar "tools" until you started the company, or was it one off idea that you grew into a company years later?
mgalka
Hired him as a temporary consultant with industry experience to help me build my startup. Things went well and at some point it became clear I had a cofounder.
tehlike
if you don't mind me asking, was that a remote consultant or on-site?
mgalka
Other side of the country. Later on, he also ended up bringing on a developer friend of his, who became a 3rd cofounder.
thatgerhard
We both worked at a digital agency and immediately hit it off.

We started doing freelance projects together and about 5 years ago we decided to quit our jobs and do this full time.

We're still at it :)

At this point we're more like brothers than business partners. Best decision ever.

jordz
+1 on this. The same thing happened with me and my Co-Founder(s).

I met Andrew (my co-founder) through some school friends and hired him when I was running my team at a digital agency (I was 18 he was 16) after 4 years of building platforms together we moved on and setup on our own. Feels like my brother a lot of the time and that's what makes it easy. The ability to be straight with each other when things don't work out but also have a mature relationship where you know where business is and that it doesn't compromise your friendship.

glavryba
Noticed his comments in every thread, which I was interested in.
acedinlowball
We met for coffee as a hacker group meetup. Turned out we complemented each other really well. We just finished raising our Series B. :)
GFischer
Wow, awesome, that's a good success story for those that did't know their co-founders beforehand.
GFischer
A mutual friend introduced us, he was really enthusiastic about building a project together (side project, not full startup for now).

We have complimentary skills (he's more of a PM and business guy). I think I was the hard one to convince :P . I've actually let him down, I'm not pushing as hard as we can and it's stuck at the side project stage (need 50 to 200 more dev hours and I'm the dev).

He actually has beta testers lined up (and willing to pay).