Y Combinator

co-founder matching platform</a> about 3 months ago. There are now 16,000 co-founder profiles on the platform. Potential co-founders have sent 130,000 matching invites through the platform, and, with a 25% acceptance rate, we’ve seen a total of 33,000 matches.We now have enough data to identify some interesting trends among our co-founder profiles and matches.<h1 id=\"who-are-the-founders-on-our-platform\">Who are the founders on our platform?</h1><ul><li>40% of profiles are from the U.S., with 60% representing another 145 countries.</li><li>42% identify as technical (i.e. “a programmer, scientist, or engineer who can build the product without outside assistance”).</li><li>43% are working full-time (40+ hours/week) on their startup, 22% are part-time (20-40 hours/week), and the remaining spend <20 hours/week on their startup.</li><li>Of the founders who are not currently working on a startup, 47% plan to start in the next 3 months, and another 21% plan to start in the next 6 months.</li><li>13% identify as a woman.</li></ul><h1 id=\"what-do-founders-care-about\">What do founders care about?</h1>We give founders the option to mark their preferences for a co-founder across several attributes, including:<ul><li>Whether they are technical</li><li>Areas of skill (Product, Design, Engineering, Sales and Marketing, Operations)</li><li>Their level of time commitment over the next few weeks (40+ hours/week, 20-40 hours/week, or less)</li><li>Their location</li><li>Whether they have shared interests (e.g. B2B/Enterprise, Biotech, etc.)</li></ul>Founders also indicate how important each attribute is: whether it’s a must-have, whether they have a preference but are flexible, or whether they don’t care at all.The two most important attributes: 79% of founders care that their co-founder can commit a certain number of hours over the next few weeks, and 74% of founders prefer to have shared interests with their co-founder. However, only 15% and 13% see these attributes as must-haves, respectively.The least important attribute? 50% of founders don’t care where their co-founder is located, perhaps a sign of the (newly remote) times.<h1 id=\"what-industries-are-founders-interested-in\">What industries are founders interested in?</h1>Each founder can select interests from the following list: Agriculture/Agtech, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (ARVR), B2B/Enterprise, Biomedical/Biotech, Blockchain, Consumer, E-Commerce, Education/Edtech, Energy, Entertainment, Financial/Fintech, Government, Hardware, Hard Tech, Healthcare, Marketplace, Non-Profit.The top 6 most popular interests:<ul><li>B2B/Enterprise (36% of founders indicate interest)</li><li>Consumer (34%)</li><li>AI (34%)</li><li>Marketplace (32%)</li><li>Fintech (29%)</li><li>E-Commerce (29%)</li></ul>Most founders select several interests; the median number of interests selected is 3. Interestingly, the most popular interests among founders who pick only 1 interest look different:<ul><li>B2B/Enterprise (17%)</li><li>Fintech (13%)</li><li>Edtech (12%)</li><li>Consumer (11%)</li><li>Healthcare (7%)</li><li>AI (7%)</li></ul><h1 id=\"what-skills-are-founders-interested-in\">What skills are founders interested in?</h1>Founders on the co-founder matching platform can claim responsibility in five areas of skill: Product, Design, Engineering, Sales and Marketing, Operations.<ul><li>65% of founders do Product</li><li>57% of founders do Operations</li><li>52% of founders do Sales and Marketing</li><li>37% of founders do Design</li><li>31% of founders do Engineering</li></ul>Here’s what founders want from their co-founder:<ul><li>62% of founders prefer a co-founder who does Engineering</li><li>42% of founders prefer a co-founder who does Product</li><li>39% of founders prefer a co-founder who does Design</li><li>37% of founders prefer a co-founder who does Sales and Marketing</li><li>28% of founders prefer a co-founder who does Operations</li></ul>Engineers seem to be in high demand. Among founders who do not do Engineering, 80% prefer a co-founder who does Engineering. Even engineers themselves are looking for more engineers: 44% of Engineering founders prefer a co-founder who does Engineering.Engineers are also looking for complementary skills though: 74% of Engineering founders prefer a co-founder who does Sales and Marketing, and 53% of Engineering founders prefer a co-founder who does Operations.<h1 id=\"who%E2%80%99s-actually-matching\">Who’s actually matching?</h1><ul><li>Founders on the platform have an average of 3.6 matches per person.</li><li>Engineers on the platform have an average of 4.8 matches per person.</li><li>Founders who aren’t married to an idea have an average of 5.1 matches per person.</li></ul>The majority of matches (68%) are made up of a technical founder paired with a non-technical founder. A bigger majority of matches (72%) are made up of founders with at least one shared interest. An even greater portion of matches (73%) are made up of a founder with an idea they’re working on paired with a founder not glued to an idea.55% of matches comprise founders located in the same country. 69% of matches are between founders in the same continent, and 61% of matches are composed of founders located within 3 time zones of each other. The rest, apparently, are from all over the world.73% of matches contain at least one full-time founder, and 92% of matches contain at least one founder who is “active” (working on a startup idea now) rather than “aspiring” (plan to work on a startup later).Finally, it seems that founders on the site are extremely active: 75% of all matches are accepted within 4.5 days of the initial invitation, and 50% of matches are accepted within 22 hours. Of the matches where founders indicate having met up either online or in person, 50% met within 6.2 days.If you are looking for a co-founder, come check out the co-founder matching platform! Sign up at <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching/">https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching.

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Before that she was an engineer at Instagram and Facebook. Cat has a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from MIT.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/catheryn/"},{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d6","name":"Katherine Bernstein","slug":"katherine-bernstein","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Katherine-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Katherine is a Product Engineer at Y Combinator, working on the Startup School team. Prior to YC, she was a co-founder and software engineer at OpenLattice.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/katherine-bernstein/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71081","name":"Catheryn Li","slug":"catheryn","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/10/catheryn.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Catheryn (Cat) is a Product Engineer at YC focused on Startup School. Before that she was an engineer at Instagram and Facebook. Cat has a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from MIT.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/catheryn/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/what-do-people-want-in-a-co-founder/","excerpt":"YC launched a co-founder matching platform about 3 months ago. 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