After a few months of beta testing, Y Combinator has launched a co-founder matching platform. The platform invites entrepreneurs to create profiles, which include information about themselves and preferences for co-founders such as location and skillsets.
It digests that information and offers many potential candidates who meet these requirements – such as Tinder National for co-founders. To date, Accelerator says it has made 9,000 matches across 4,500 founders. The Y combinator is clearly in a good position to make this tool work. The accelerator is a popular startup school that provides a free online program with resources and lectures on how to start an organization for anyone who wants to start an organization.
The school has built a community of 230,000 founders in 190 countries. A matching tool is an easy jump to create, it can help partners out there even before gathering new talent and moving on. Significantly, the two companies that met through the matching platform are part of the YC Summer 2021 batch. Yay ecosystem! Take my heat though: this tool may present itself as a neat, in-demand, and simplicity tool that connects people to each other, but it’s harder to perform in a meaningful way than you think – if you’re an accelerator Famous and well known as YC.
For this tool of goodwill instead of what was then suggested, I put together after talking to Jennifer Nandorfer, co-founder of January Ventures, for her thoughts.
- Adverse selection is a real thing. Neudorfer told me that in the past, co-founder matching tools only attracted founders without a network, which couldn’t do much better after combining their backgrounds and not meeting with VCs. How a co-founder matching tool finds its Goldilocks situation – attracts the star PM at the start of a high heat about entrepreneurship and has absolutely no connection to the ambitious postgraduate but valley people with a love of code.
- The YC told me here that “we do not want demographic information from startup school participants except for the recently opened text box for lead; and a large percentage can still meet it. At the moment, we’re using this information in Co-Founder Mills – if you’re a woman, we can identify you as a female co-founder and we’re increasing the chances of you seeing any co-founder candidates.”
- Co-founder matching tools are best for founders who don’t have a built-in network and need ways to find collaborators in their early days. Startup schools are actually a vast net, but since Y Combator struggles with minority representation and diversity in its batches, ways need to be found to ensure it matches up with the organization. Can there be a filter for gender or ethnic background? Should there be? It’s slippery.
