The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
Founders need sizable egos to believe that what they are creating is good enough to change the world. What makes for great co-founders is having those egos focused on complementary, not competing, skills.
More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.
... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.
For the first two years of Eventbrite, all the work was done by just the three founders: me, my husband, Kevin, and our chief technology officer, Renaud Visage.
Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns - companies that could change your life to work at or invest in if you're not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder.
My OkCupid co-founders are my best friends. We were in each other's weddings.
A social worker named Cosette Rae, along with a therapist named Hilarie Cash, founded 'ReSTART' in what, until then, had been Rae's house.
Unless you have fixed costs, you don't need any capital to create a prototype. Ideally, your co-founders, with sweat equity, can create the product themselves.
I was one of the founders in, in that, the three of us all had the, had the founder's stock.
For entrepreneurs, choosing your co-founders is like a professional marriage. You're going to go through tough times, and you need to remember that ideas can change, but business partners can't.
It's not at all a secret that I was one of the co-founders of Brand New Congress, and we've never tried to hide our goals.
Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.
The one thing that Airbnb had was, Brian and Joe were designers, and they did a great job. They also had Nate Blecharczyk, who was the CTO, who I describe his history as a high schooler and at Harvard as really a creator of tools for spammers.
