What are some good places / networks to connect with potential co-founders for a tech startup?

Instead of looking at who does what .. why not look at the things that need to get done for a small techology team. Product: 6 people - 3 full stack engineers - 2 front end developers - 1 designer / product person Marketing & Community, 1 person - Full time hire, or CEO Support & Operations, 1 person - Part time hire, or CEO + Whole team I believe it's important for everyone on the team to help with support. Also, if you have a great product, then support shouldn't be that taxing. Q&A is usually needed when you have a bad development process (no unit testing or continuous integration deployments). Outsource everything else. - Bookeeping - HR stuff - Legal - Government program paperwork Hope that helps. P.S. I would put as many people on product as that's where you'll get the most bang for your buck.

I think you should give equity to anyone who's going to have an impact on your team. That's true for engineers, designers and especially marketing people. Some of the most important people are marketers - however, the best marketers are more product marketers then just a PR / community person. Equity usually vest over 4 years, so there's 0 risk in issue equity to anyone ... cause if they don't perform, just let them go and no big deal. Hope that helps.

I'm a feelance CFO and I work actively with early stage companies. I've been at this for almost 30 years. Some of my current and recent clients wrestle actively with this very questions. My advice is to have the tough conversations right up front, early in the team building process. This usually consists of answering questions like, "who's in charge and what does that really mean," "who gets how much of the company and when and in exchange for what," "what are you, you and you really bringing to the table in terms of skills and cash," and "who is really in a life situation that will allow them to sustain their commitment to the business?" Any team that can get through these questions can get through the trials of surviving startup. I'm happy to talk with you directly about these issues and, in particular, to help look at them through a strategic financial planning lens.

I feel your pain — I've been there several times in a couple of my companies. Each situation ended up being unique, and had to be handled differently. I think there are a few things to consider before you make your decision: -- 1. What is in your cofounder's way? Is you cofounder being held up by a lack of clarity? Lack of motivation? Lack of autonomy? One of my past cofounders was very good at getting the job done, but didn't naturally have the skill to lay out tasks in a manageable way. To get around this, I worked with the whole team (4 people) to write up process documentation that removed the need to "figure out what to do next" that was tripping up this cofounder. -- 2. What job was your cofounder brought on to complete? And is it being completed? One of my companies brought on a cofounder simply to give us a marketing platform — he had a huge online audience — but he did nothing else. At first, this caused tension; once we had specifically laid out who was on the team and for what purpose, it was easier to identify where responsibilities lay. -- 3. Is your cofounder capable of doing the job? One of the more painful ordeals I've gone through in business is bringing on a good friend, then realizing that — despite his talent and intelligence — he just wasn't able to perform the job I'd hired him for. His skills were better suited for a different job: he needs hands-on management; he works better with repetitive tasks that don't require big-picture thinking; he lacks assertiveness and confidence, which were critical for the management-level role he'd been hired to do. After I tried to clear everything in his way, it became clear the company couldn't survive if he remained on the team. I had to lay him off. -- 4. Do you just simply not like the way this cofounder works? In one of my startups, there was a cofounder who I didn't know all that well, but he had amazing industry contacts and domain knowledge. However, once we started working together it became clear that we had VERY different working styles. He drove me completely nuts with (what seemed to me to be) a very ADHD-style of planning, with projects starting and being dropped and then coming out of nowhere with a call at 21:00 to discuss something critical that would be forgotten tomorrow. I'm sure I drove him nuts, too. So eventually we ended up selling that company — it was that or shutter it — because we knew there wasn't a chance we'd be successful if we continued as we were. -- Working with other people is tricky in general. Our instinct is to assume that we're the best workers on the planet and everyone else is incompetent, an idiot, a slacker, or all of the above. Usually it's a combination of an organizational-level lack of clarity, poor communication, no processes, and (sometimes) plain ol' we-don't-see-eye-to-eye-on-things-ness. Hopefully that helps. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to hear specifics on my situations, or if you'd like any help devising a strategy for resolving your cofounder trouble. Good luck!

The number one would be shipping product (or anything really) out in front of a customer. If you can't work together to get something done fast, that is usually a huge indicator that somethings wrong. That usually means your values or mission aren't aligned.