Power

Y Combinator launches a new way for co-founders to find each other

Only four of YC's top 100 companies came to the program without a co-founder. Promoting matches could widen the pool of successful applicants.

Mug that says "we heart founders"

Founders are getting a matchmaking boost from Y Combinator.

Photo: Shannon Rowies/Unsplash

It's a question Y Combinator's Kyle Corbitt has heard over and over again: How do I find a co-founder? As leader of YC's Startup School, its free entrepreneurship curriculum, Corbitt found many aspiring founders wanted to work on a problem, but faced a roadblock when it came to finding a partner who they could build a company with.

That's why YC is unveiling a new way to help co-founders find each other. Its new co-founder matching service will allow founders to fill out profiles about what their interests are and what attributes they're looking for in a co-founder.

"We realized this is a problem a lot of founders face, particularly internationally," Corbitt said. "I think it's less of a problem if you've gone to Stanford or live in San Francisco where there's a stronger established network that makes it easier to find people, but our community is all over the world. We have startup founders in 190 countries."

There is also proof in the data that having a co-founder is important: Of YC's top 100 companies , only four went through the famed accelerator without a co-founder. (Those would be Ryan Petersen's Flexport, Blake Scholl's Boom, Aaron King's Snapdocs and Ryan Chan's UpKeep.)

A common match is non-technical founders looking for technical founders, said Catheryn Li, an engineer at YC who built the service. Founders also often narrow it down by geography, from "entirely remote" or "same time zone" to looking for people within a country or within 30 miles of their town. After founders match, YC sends them a survey and encourages them to work on a project together. It's even templated an agreement to help dodge co-founder disputes.

Already 4,500 people have used it, and over 9,000 matches have been made from people testing it within the Startup School community. Li said the median number of profiles someone goes through is around a hundred. On Tuesday, anyone will be able to sign up to be added.


Screenshot of Y Combinator's matching service Co-founder profiles on Y Combinator's matching service let people select their location preferences, job responsibilities and whether or not they're set on an idea. Image: YC


If it feels a bit like founder dating, well, it's not far off. There are companies, including one actually named FounderDating , that have tried doing this before. CoFoundersLab, which bought FounderDating, claims to have over 400,000 members. Founder2be had over 100,000 founders before it shut down in December. It now recommends people to try Stealth , another startup community for founders to find each other.

"It's also worth noting that any company who tries to monetize this will be clearly not super aligned with the objective, whereas, because our school's main mission is to make entrepreneurship free and accessible to everyone, it makes sense that we can make resources to really care about whether the companies are being made or successful," Li said. "We're not trying to monetize and make money off active users, or we're not selling ads. We don't want you to stay on the platform, even. We want you to actually find the right co-founder and go do something else."

Other venture firms simply advertise job postings. Greylock, for example, is currently hiring a technical co-founder for an ecommerce-related position and a data scientist to be co-founder of an enterprise B2B company.

YC, though, is going for scale with the hopes that some of the co-founder pairs end up applying to its accelerator batches. It started by testing the service within its own Startup School community and has already seen co-founders like an NFL player sign up, Corbitt said. The question now will be what happens when it's open to everyone. So far, YC plans to manually vet applications to make sure it's really entrepreneurs looking for co-founders.

"For any product like this, where the community is really important, we have to make sure to build trust in the community," Li said. "So we don't want to let on anyone who's soliciting leads for sales or a consultancy or even trying to hire. We really want to make sure that everyone you meet here is really looking for a co-founder."

That part, at least, is working. There are two companies going through its current accelerator batch that met through the co-founder matching platform, and it remains in YC's interest to create more. Around 10% of each batch is solo founders, "but when we look at the companies that do well in the long term," Li pointed out, you can count on one hand the number of solo-founder startups that top the list of YC's best companies. Today, the average number of people on a founding team going through YC is 2.3.

"Intuitively, it makes sense that starting a company is just so hard," Li said, "and you'll run into so many problems, that having someone with you, someone who may have complementary skills, someone who can be there with you for the ups and downs of your company is just extremely, extremely valuable."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep Reading Show less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more .

Keep Reading Show less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep Reading Show less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison ( @dgoodison ) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep Reading Show less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich ) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins