More Words of Wisdom from Paul Graham: Choosing Your Co-Founder

by Scott Edward Walker on February 8th, 2017

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a short video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.

This week, we again present startup guru Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator and a brilliant entrepreneur and investor.  In this brief interview from a few years back (via TechCrunch), Paul shares some solid nuggets regarding founders and co-founders, including the following:

  • “The founder is more important than the idea – a lot more important.” (at 0:43)
  • We are looking for co-founders “who have been friends for a while [and] have worked together on things so they know one another’s capacities.” (at 1:31)
  • “What we don’t like are [co-founders] who only came together for the purposes of doing this startup.” (at 1:41)
  • “It’s really bad if we’re talking to a bunch of founders and we can’t figure-out who the leader is.” (at 3:05)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott

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