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Y Combinator Co-founder Matching — YC’s free online platform to help you find your co-founder
Find a high-quality co-founder on our platform of 4500 founders. Tell us about yourself and your preferences and we’ll show you profiles of your ideal candidates. If there’s mutual interest, we match the two of you.
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@the_andriy_bond right now we're building support for tracking trial projects with prospective co-founders, adding more facets and filters to profiles and improving the matching algorithm. Longer term we have more ambitious plans, of course. :)
Very cool @catheryn @kyle_corbitt, congratulations on launching. This is definitely the next logical addition to the YC startup success funnel.
This is a great idea! Exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. Thanks team for building this
Hi Product Hunt! I'm Cat, I'm a PM/engineer here at YC. I'm super excited to announce our co-founder matching platform!
Finding the right co-founder is both crucial to your startup's success and often very challenging. 25% of our very own Startup School aspiring founders cite not having a co-founder as a main blocker to their startup's progress. We built our platform to try and tackle this problem.
Our solution is still experimental and we expect to iterate a lot. But there are some early signs of success! To date, we've made 9000 matches across 4500 founders, and 3 companies who met through our platform got accepted into the YC Summer 2021 batch!
If you or anyone you know is looking for a co-founder, come check it out! Our team is here to answer any questions and we’d love to hear your feedback.
Hi @catheryn Great product, May I have your email . I have something I would like to talk to you about regarding your project. Alternatively you can email me splashview24@gmail.com.
How can this be free? I personally owe YC a lot. Even if we've never been accepted, all the content & Startup School alone taught me a lot.
I'll make sure to spread the news 🤩
@mert_aktas I agree Mert, Startup School community is one of the best places to build a matching platform around it. YC did it again :)
@mert_aktas I'm so happy to hear that Startup School has helped you! Hopefully our co-founder matching platform can have an equally large impact in the lives of many founders.
Our business model on the SUS side is pretty simple: build awesome products for founders, and trust that some percentage of them will choose to apply to YC's core program. About 44% of YC's latest batch of companies went through Startup School, so this model works pretty well. And in fact, **3** companies from the latest batch met each other through the co-founder matching beta specifically!
@kyle_corbitt amazing, 44% is PRETTY high percentage! but it totally makes sense because the content is always top-notch.
Congrats YC team! What results or feedback did you receive from these first 9000 matches? And how did it work?
I’m surprised that YC does something like this because they seem to not recommend taking some random person as a co-founder and this sounds exactly doing it.
@elias_lankinen Bad ideas seem only bad until they decide to do it. Same with entrepreneurial education. Wish they'd just own it. "Hey, we changed our mind" instead of "Oh no, we always thought this was a good idea the way we're doing it right now." Seems disingenuous to me, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since they've done so much good for the founder community.
Much needed thing as Indie Hackers constantly asks for finding co-founders. Hopefully, it will solve this problem.
A great product for a fairly obvious but not well solved problem. I met a few good people already and it's just my second week. So well done . On the positives, the quality of the people is good and co-founder filter questions are also well thought through. A couple of things that could possibly be shaped better. 1 - There are a set of people who don't seem to be much active on the system based on talking to a few users(passively looking rather than actively looking). For those that are actively looking mostly don't tend to get requests from these passive folks who are looking to collaborate the folks that are actively looking. 2 - Wouldn't it be good to know if someone you pinged to connect isn't interested or haven't checked the email, rather than waiting endlessly? 3 - I think most people haven't uploaded videos and for some you don't get a sense of why they are in the platform and what they are actually after - very little intro and context.
I've seen similar platforms before, but I think having founders gather around the same school of though is the actual game changer here.
Won't be surprised to see some great companies rising in the next years, with founders who've met here.
It's really great to see a new platforms like this are being built, especially by the YC team.
Exciting times ahead! 👏
@robertgavriles1 yes, the shared "cultural context" around YC/Startup School's startup playbook/philosophy is key to communicating clearly and starting these relationships off on the right foot. That's exactly why we chose to build this as part of Startup School, instead of as a standalone product.
Finding the right co-founder is an incredibly difficult and important part of the startup journey, glad YC is providing resources to help tackle this problem. Congrats all!
It's about time a viable option for this came out and I can't think of a more credible place to create it. I will be creating a profile sometime this year I am sure
I tried the beta a couple of months ago, this is a great tool for early-stage startups!
@kyrilku Thanks for being an early user! Please let us know how we can improve the experience for you!
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