The Co-founder Search Struggles

After leaving my full-time job a few months ago, I've been on my co-founder search. I knew this wouldn't be easy, and it's not - here's some of my reflections on the process so far.

The Practical Gates

Before you can even get to the exciting parts of building something together, there are fundamental hurdles that need to align. These are the "entry criteria" - non-negotiables that can stop a potential partnership before it starts:

• Not everyone has the same opportunity to go full-time
• Different financial needs and runway requirements
• Varying risk tolerance and financial safety nets
• Splitting the many responsibilities cleanly
• Mismatched exit goals - from quick flips to long-term building
• Conflicting views on fundraising vs bootstrapping
• Different approaches to growth - Y Combinator-style blitzscaling versus sustainable scaling
• Disagreements on business fundamentals - product-led vs sales-led, B2B vs B2C
• Varying time horizons - some want quick validation, others are ready for a 10-year journey

The Domain Dilemma

One of the trickiest aspects has been aligning on what to build. When you've worked in a specific industry, there's an inherent tension between two paths:

The Familiar Path

• Leveraging existing expertise and networks
• Deep understanding of the problems
• The daunting shadow of "Can I really do better than what's already been built?"

The New Territory

• Fresh excitement and perspective
• Untapped opportunities
• A longer, steeper, learning curve

Skills vs Chemistry

Skills are straightforward to evaluate - you can look at someone's work and get a pretty good idea. But working relationships are different. You can have coffee chats for months, but you'll learn more about compatibility in one week of actually building something together than in all those conversations combined.

Final Thoughts

Finding a co-founder is often compared to dating or marriage, but in some ways, it's even more complex. The stakes feel impossibly high - you're not just sharing a life together, you're building something that could define your professional legacy.

There's something super unnatural about trying to compress what should be years of trust-building into a few months of coffee chats. Yet here we are, racing against runway, trying to make potentially the most important partnership decision of our professional lives.

Perhaps the hardest pill to swallow is that even when you find someone great, timing and circumstances might still not align. The right partner at the wrong moment is still the wrong partner. I hope you connect with the right person at the right time.

Thanks for reading,
James