People say finding a co-founder is a crazy hard task, but in reality, you have to find the most retarded person you can vibe with. If you are both equally retarded, you are the best co-founder match.
Many people get it wrong, thinking they need someone in the same field or something like that. It’s not about being smart at one thing and finding someone smart at the same thing. You can get smarter, but you can’t be more retarded. You can’t degrade, right? A person can’t degrade in intelligence or vibe. I don’t know if they can, but they are all wrong.
You don’t need to outweigh the downsides with similarities. The flaws you have in common are the most important thing.
For example, me and Mony are the best co-founders possible. We have a lot of similar traits, traits that can’t be said here. But when we first met, we both were bored by the absolute larp of that YC dinner. Of course, the YC people were cool, but every invited person was just into, you know, what you’re building, what you’re this.
Come on, guys, where are we? You should enjoy yourself and talk normally. You don’t have to give your YC interview to every fucking person in that room!
Jared Friedman invited both of us to a dinner at Reservoir in Indiranagar. Mony was telling his story to random people. I was standing alone because I was an autistic fuck and didn’t know how to socialize. Mony sounded really fucking cool to me, and we started talking.
He was also bored with every retarded person in the room. It was not enjoyable at all! We started talking and had a lot of fun. It was the best night of my life.
We were bored, so we went up to random people together, made up fucking stories, and just had fun. We told some people that my dad is CEO of Dropbox. Mony told some people that he owns AI.com and stuff like that, because that’s what we are.
We are serious about our work, but we are not very formal. We don’t dress up in suits to go to an investor meeting. We go in shorts and a T-shirt because that’s who we are. We don’t need to pretend. We don’t need to glaze someone. We don’t need to butter up all the fucking people we meet. We don’t need to lie about something.
For all the fuck-ass people who told me Mony is not this, Mony is not that, maybe he’s not the right co-founder, maybe being best friends isn’t the best thing for co-founders: write all of it on a piece of paper and shove it up your ass.
I have met a lot of people in my life. So has Mony. I’ve met about a hundred founders, a lot of very cool people in Bangalore, and spent time talking to them. So far, I haven’t found another person in the world who can be what Mony is to me.
You know what a co-founder needs to be? He needs to be not annoying. If you don’t like talking to him, don’t like being around him, and he keeps annoying you, how the fuck are you going to build a company together?
This essay was not supposed to be emotional, but he’s a fucking brother to me. Every time someone says something against him, my blood boils. I want to fucking choke them.
Mony is a research person. I’m an engineering person. The company we want to build needs research, and somebody has to engineer the things we research. We are the perfect thing. He is into AI. I am into AI. He’s very interested in maths, and I’m very interested in agents. Maths also requires agents, and agents also require maths. We aren’t working on completely separate products. We’re learning. We have to be the fucking best. We are building, researching, learning, and doing everything in our hands to do this.