Thread: Finding a co-founder

I've been working on a start up for a while now and I'm at the stage where I need to find my "Tech guy". Living in Australia I'm finding it very hard to find this person.. Has anyone ever worked on a start up with the co founder living in another country?

What are your thoughts?

Though I would think location is extremely important I've always found that passion and motivation says it all. If you can find someone who is as passionate as you are in your start up than you surely found a good match. It might take weeks to tell but let it happen.

There's a site called Founder Dating but I dont know if they're in Australia.

I'm a member of around 15+ meetup groups in my area, founder2be.com, put adds everywhere..Seeing to be a lot harder than I thought!

My good friend is a Partner at KKR in Sydney. If you need help I can forward your information onto him.

I have worked with many startups and would be happy to help.

I've started two software/app companies and can't imagine what it would be like trying to launch an app without knowing anything about the software development lifecycle or basic coding. Fortunately, I'm a programmer. Even more fortunate is that I have a team of developers that I recruited from past relationships. Because of the relationship I had with them as colleagues, bringing them onboard as co-founders was easy.

It took me almost 5 years to hire my first developer from the outside. Intellectual Property like coding must be taken seriously. I remember asking one candidate to send me some sample code. The clown zipped up an entire project from a past customer including their database and emailed it to me. On top of that, the db was medical info related to patient skin diseases. My point is that if hiring presents challenges like this, you will run into the same issues trying to bring in a co-founder that is a complete stranger.

My advice is to get some experience in app development. You don't need to be great at it. You don't even need to be good at it. But you need to know what to look for when bringing someone on board. Being able to call someone on their bullshit when it comes to coding is going to be the bare minimum requirement.

And I also don't recommend giving up ownership as a co-founder in sole exchange for coding experience. You are going to give up a chunk of ownership for a skill you can hire for relatively cheaply. There are plenty of talented developers out there that can do the job, and have no interest in taking it to the next step of entrepreneur. Find them.

Money to hire a developer shouldn't be an issue. You can always build the bare minimums with a limited budget. Don't release with all the bells and whistles. Release with what you need to test if there is a market for what you are selling. You can add the bells and whistles once your budget increases. Software development is ongoing anyways. Only fools build out 100% of the app before releasing, only to find out that the market says they got 80% of it wrong.

If all this sounds hard..it is. But it can be done. I coached my cousin, who was an unemployed finance major, to building and marketing his first app. You just need to start acquiring the basic knowledge of coding.

^^Thanks a lot for that, I really appreciate it.

We have found a dev to come over board with the startup, He is a full time web dev + has his MBA. What we are going to do is sit down, chat about what our goals are, give him milestones to meet. Hopefully this works out well.

I used to have a co-founder ... he stole money from the company account so I kicked him out. After about 7 months ... I started to understand him better. We were not compatible ... and things were getting rough. I am glad that he stole the money. I was going to buy him out ... but this way I got the other 50 percent of the shares for free and simplified the whole legal process.

I agree with you finding a partner is hard. It is just like a marrying someone. The partner is pretty much your spouse and the company is your kid.

Anyhow ... the company is doing awesome now.