Your cofounder search has a blind spot

👋 Hi, it’s Carmen Tsang, and I’m here with this week’s edition of The Midnight Text—Forum Ventures’ newsletter tackling the honest, messy, and often unspoken moments that keep founders up at night. I’m Head of Talent at Forum’s AI Venture Studio. I spend my days connecting with first-time and repeat founders, and first hires who are looking to go from 0 to 1. I also advise our portfolio companies on hiring founding teams. I’ve spent the last 14 years in technical talent acquisition, executive sourcing, and startup recruitment consulting.

A founder I’m working with had her first potential co-founder conversation a few weeks ago. She came out energized. So I asked her to walk me through it.

After only a few minutes it became clear to me that she’d been pitching the potential co-founder the whole time, as if they were an investor: here’s the problem, here’s the product, here’s the traction, etc. The other person asked questions, she naturally answered them, and the conversation that was supposed to be a mutual feel-out had inadvertently become an interview… with her in the chair. And what she had thought was a great conversation was obvious to me had been mediocre, and didn’t set her up to uncover if this person would be the right fit.

A lot of founders who are mid- or post-fundraise tend to make a terrible first impression on potential co-founders. The style and focus of an investor conversation is the complete opposite of what should happen in a co-founder exploration conversation, and it’s because you’re performing when you should be listening and connecting on a more intimate level.

What often happens is when a founder gets so wrapped up in talking about the company, the focus stays on the company rather than the people, they forget to ask a lot of important vetting questions, and they lose the thread on the signals that actually matter, then later fill in the gaps with assumptions.

Getting this wrong isn’t just an awkward few months. Carta data on over 22,000 co-founder teams found that roughly 1 in 4 will lose a co-founder within the first three years, and the split is rarely clean. Cofounder struggles can stem from vision misalignment, differing expectations, workload imbalance, and more. The resulting breakup can cost time, equity, and sometimes the company itself.

A co-founder conversation needs to be much closer to a first date, because you’re going to spend a LOT of time with this person in the years to come, go through ups and downs together, navigate tough decisions, make compromises, and more. Here’s how you can approach this search to get the most out of your time with people.

Stop selling. Start vetting.

For founders that have been on the fundraising track, you’re going to have to hold yourself back from the instinct to sell. Here are three ways you can do this:

1. Try your best not to only talk about the company on your first call. The first conversation needs to uncover if you can vibe with this person: can you talk to them for an hour and enjoy it? Are you challenged to think differently about something? Are they leaning in, getting curious, and asking thoughtful questions? Ideally, you’ll find out a few personal things in common and geek out on something together.

2. Ask more than you answer. You need to find out what they’re actually looking for before you tell them what you’re building.

3. Send homework before the call like a short read on your space. Then see how they engage with it. Do they come back with sharp questions? Do they think critically about it, or just nod along? You’ll learn something important about them from this.

Know what you’re actually looking for.

There’s a big difference between a technical co-founder and a founding engineer, and a search can take a lot longer than it needs to if you haven’t decided which one you need.

A technical co-founder wants to own the business with you, emotionally and strategically, not just technically. They will get curious about your market, your customers, and your model.

A founding engineer, on the other hand, wants to build the thing. If they only want to talk about the product roadmap and the technology, you’ve probably found a great founding engineer, not a co-founder. Which might be exactly what you need right now, and you can pick up your co-founder search back up in six to twelve months.

Look for talent that’s not just credentialed.

When you’re evaluating technical talent, resist the urge to chase the most impressive logos or titles in the room. If they’ve been early at something and continued to show resilience or longevity in doing something hard, that’s a fantastic signal. Don’t just look at the career chapters, look at what else they’ve tried, failed at, and then succeeded. That’s the type of resilience building a startup from the ground up requires.

Get in the room.

If you can find founder circles or meetups near you, go work the room in person. You’ll read people better face to face, and you’ll pick up on how other people run these conversations too. If in-person isn’t available, even listening to a few founder-to-founder interviews on a podcast can help reset your instincts before you go into your next conversation.

The search for a co-founder is going to feel unfamiliar for a while, especially if you’re good at pitching. That’s fine. Getting a few conversations under your belt, even the ones that go nowhere, is how you get to the point where the right one actually flows.

So the next time you sit down with someone, try this. Talk less. Ask more. See if you like them before you sell them.

Good luck,
Carmen

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