How To Find A Co-Founder

Taggar says a co-founder helps founders get more work done and improve its quality through complementary skills and honest feedback. A co-founder can also provide support through the emotional highs and lows of a startup. He points to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, as examples of co-founding teams.

Taggar advises most founders to find a co-founder before starting, with an exception for an engineer who has strong domain experience and conviction about a specific idea. He says the most important quality is handling stress well, ideally demonstrated by having worked together under pressure. Founders should align on their goals and expectations, and prioritize a co-founder's ability to learn over a narrow set of current skills.

Taggar recommends working on projects with people before deciding to start a company together, and asking people in your network directly rather than assuming they are unavailable. If someone declines, ask for an introduction to a potential co-founder. Open-source projects, hackathons, developer meetups, and YC Co-Founder Matching can widen the search; he suggests looking for people with shared interests and backgrounds.

If founders do not know each other well, Taggar recommends trying small projects together and discussing their reasons for starting a company and their goals. Once they commit, he advises an equal equity split, since the startup may take a decade or more and early differences in effort can become small over that time.

Taggar identifies loss of respect, competing for the CEO role, and different expectations about work ethic as common sources of breakups. He advises founders to raise disagreements early and schedule regular check-ins, such as a monthly meal, to discuss how the partnership is going before tensions build.