Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Before they were the co-founders of billion-dollar technology companies—Microsoft, Apple, Google—they were friends, classmates, lab mates.
But most people aren’t lucky enough to meet their ideal co-founder before it’s time to start a company. Is there a more systematic way for today’s most promising entrepreneurs to find the right business partners?
The short answer is no. In Seattle, local events and organizations like Seattle Tech Startups, Seattle 2.0, Open Coffee, Lunch 2.0, nPost, NWEN, and WTIA all play important roles in bringing the entrepreneurial community together. But none focuses solely on matching up potential founders. That’s where FounderDating comes in.
OK, in Seattle we already have Founder’s Co-op (seed-stage tech investment fund) and Founder Institute (entrepreneur training), and Foundry Group’s Brad Feld is a household name in these parts (he’s helping to bring startup bootcamp TechStars to Seattle this year). But FounderDating—this is something entirely different. And it could contribute to the changing face of how early-stage companies get off the ground in this town.
Unlike TechStars and Founder Institute, FounderDating is not looking to provide mentorship or training to entrepreneurs. And unlike most other local tech events, it’s not about content or general-purpose networking. It’s about one thing: hooking up with the right co-founder.
FounderDating was started in the San Francisco Bay Area by Saar Gur of Charles River Ventures and Jessica Alter from Formative Labs. They are bringing the event to Seattle for the first time on February 9, with the help of local organizer Brian Schultz, the co-founder of Seattle’s Ontela and Djinnisys (now Plectix Biosystems), who’s currently on his second tour of duty with Microsoft. The exact format of the event is TBA, but it will involve roughly 25 hand-picked entrepreneurs and potential co-founders meeting in a structured way at a restaurant. It might incorporate some “speed dating” elements or other ways to match up people who have interests in areas like mobile, Internet, commerce, advertising, and aerospace.
Schultz, who worked for Lehman Brothers in a previous life, speaks from experience when he says the big challenge in starting a company is “finding good people to do it with.” That means being able to “diversify the skill set and get momentum around ideas.” He says, “Most likely the sweet spot for FounderDating will be founders who have done it before. They know what they want, and what they need.”
The importance of the team can’t be overstated, it seems. “The number one cause of companies dying is founders not working well together. You don’t hear about those because they’re stillborn,” says Dan Shapiro, a fellow Ontela co-founder and now chief technology officer of Photobucket. “Picking your co-founder is a make-or-break decision for a company.”
I’ve recently talked with a number of Seattle-area entrepreneurs and scientists who are interested in the FounderDating program—either in participating directly, or in its potential to give a boost to the local innovation scene. A common thread is that it’s damn near impossible to
