Looking for a co-founder is how you end up with the wrong one
Treat a co-founder as a precondition for starting a company and you usually end up settling for a ‘co-founder of convenience’; four solo founders explain from experience that you should run on your own first, and the right person shows up along the way.
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Treat a co-founder as a precondition and you settle
Julian says it plainly on the show: many people believe ‘you have to have a co-founder to start’, so they treat finding one as a precondition for starting a company — and that makes them more likely to end up with a bad co-founder. SFP's position is not anti-co-founder; quite the opposite, they think a good co-founder is fantastic. The problem is the order: having an idea first and then going to find someone to fill the slot is a completely different outcome from running first and meeting the right person along the way. Aldo is the latter — he went through four different ideas before he met his current co-founder.
— JulianA co-founder doesn't have to be CEO and CTO
Aldo's current company does ‘turn any computer into a data center’. His co-founder was originally his angel investor, then volunteered to become his founding engineer, and only later was upgraded to co-founder. The two define the relationship unusually: they don't think of themselves as CEO and CTO but as ‘artist, producer’, switching roles whenever the company needs it. The detail shows the shape of a co-founder relationship can be custom-built — there's no need to force it into a standard template.
— AldoRetention is growth, not an optimization after growth
One line Aldo repeats is ‘retention is growth’. Chai says Aldo taught him which numbers to look at and what a smile curve is, lessons he still uses every day. More important is Aldo's criticism of ‘growth is good so retention can wait’: when growth is good you feel you can ignore retention, but the moment growth stops, you regret not having watched it. Many founders, while growth is good, just pour on more burn and leave everything else to luck — and once luck isn't on your side, you fall as fast as you rose.
— AldoPull on the thread, don't stop at the second-best answer
Chai first chose between two directions: travel and software reliability. Because travel had an existing audience and distribution, he built an AI email client for travel first, and quickly found the direction extremely hard to scale. The second idea came from watching user sessions to find pain points, and that too proved hard to scale. He still isn't sure whether those ideas were ‘bad ideas’ — only that he didn't want to do them. Eventually he went back to software reliability and made one key flip: instead of guessing top-down how customers will use your software, he has the software simulate every possible customer action and production scenario, turning reliability into a compute problem.
— ChaiTell real feedback apart from fake heat signals
Nemanja says the most important thing he learned at SFP was distinguishing which feedback is worth iterating on and which is just a misleading heat signal. His example is concrete: a Twitter post getting hundreds or thousands of likes doesn't mean you should pay attention to it. If you have free users and free heat but no conversion to paying customers, you're running a free trend, not a business. Every piece of feedback Aldo gave him was the same question: what would make someone pay you 10x more? How do you make it worth 10x to a large enterprise?
— NemanjaA co-founder failure can destroy everything
Nemanja has seen the counterexample: a company with a great idea, a huge market, money from top investors, marquee customers — every condition perfect — that collapsed completely because the co-founder was wrong, and the company shut down. Much of the conversation he hears is ‘these things should have been hashed out before starting the company’. That's what made him decide not to force a co-founder search. Aldo's two experiences confirm it: at his first company his co-founder was his dad, he was 17, and the power dynamic was very strange; the second was with his best friend from college, who spoke at his wedding, but being that close made hard conversations hard, and the co-founders eventually split.
— NemanjaYou don't have to wait until you start to find people
Aldo's current co-founder is 20 years older than him and was originally his first employee. Aldo says what excites him most is that someone far more experienced, who could have done it alone, chose to trust his vision. His advice: you don't have to wait until you start a company to go find people — the best thing is to bring the right people into the company. This matters especially for solo founders: run on your own first and meet the right person along the way, which is more reliable than locking in a co-founder from the start.
— AldoSolo together means five co-founders
At the end the show asks each person what ‘solo together’ means to them. Nemanja says it means always having a group of geniuses behind you — for technical problems or investment negotiations, people who both give the right advice and understand his panic. Chai says it's like having five co-founders, because everyone is on a similar journey at different stages, and the problems they hit are ones you'll hit sooner or later. Dravya says he did four years as a solo founder because he didn't want to go through the pain of a co-founder split again, and this feels like family — nobody competes with each other, because the real opponent is the market and the customer.
— NemanjaIn their own words · checked verbatim
we actually believe the opposite. We believe that, like, great co-founders can be amazing, but that oftentimes people who think that they need a co-founder to get started will ultimately end up with a bad co-founder because they think it's a prerequisite.
Julian2:07
when things are going well, they would like just tune up the burn and then not care about anything else. I mean, I think it's it works, but like it just you basically give up a lot of the things like put a lot of the things on the luck. And if that like stops being on your side, you just like go tank just as quickly
Aldo9:23
even if my Twitter post gets hundreds of thousands of likes, that's not something I should be focusing on. My focus should be towards customers and making an even more valuable product for customers.
Nemanja20:35
if I have a free offering and I'm able to generate free users or free hype around it, unless I actually convert it to customers, paying customers, I'm not really running a business. I've created maybe a free trend.
Nemanja21:38
you can have everything working out for you. But if you have just like. bad person like or not the right person with you like building it it could all go to waste
Nemanja24:44
I think it's it's like having five other co-founders with you because they are all going through the similar journey as you are and are probably in different stages of them building the company and are experiencing problems that you would event like at some point do
Chai32:08
Figures
| SFP first cohort applicants and admits | 1000 applications, 6 spots | 10:23 |
| SFP fourth cohort applicants and admits | 4500 applications, 10 spots | 10:23 |
| Nemanja's customer count when he joined SFP | roughly 40 to 50 customers | 19:35 |
| Age gap with Aldo's current co-founder | 20 years older than him | 29:02 |
Glossary
- leaky bucket
- A model in which users constantly churn and you need continuous acquisition just to hold growth steady, emphasizing that retention matters more than acquisition.
- smile curve
- The curve of retention rate over time: it falls first and then rises again, shaped like a smile.
- SFP
- Solo Founders Program, a program that puts solo founders together in San Francisco for three months to build companies.
- ODF
- Open Dev Fund, a one-week program where several early SFP members got their start.
How to listen
Founders agonizing over whether to find a co-founder, and founders who have already started solo and want to talk with others like them.
10:23 to 11:24 is a promo for the SFP program; skip it.