yes, it was... YC definitely set me up on several "cofounder dates" during the course of YC... some of them looked promising, but ultimately none worked out. Eventually I had to just bear down and prepare for launch/demo day. As soon as I stopped looking, the right person came along :)
Cool! I'd be interested to hear your experience with 1) getting into YC as a single founder and 2) working alone in the ensuing months. That's quite a feat.
I've been considering writing a post about my experience to this effect.
Basically it boiled down to sheer ignorance. I didn't know that being a single-founder was such a big deal (in a negative sense), so I didn't know I should have been worried/nervous about it when applying/interviewing.
As for working alone... I had done so many personal projects at nights/weekends after work at my day job that working alone was just natural (again, ignorance was bliss). I was also able to draw from each of the previous projects to piece together what I needed to build Notifo very quickly.
This is the advantage of working on a bunch of different small projects all the time. The criteria I used for starting a new project was that I had to do at least one thing I had never done before which required me to learn a new language/technology/framework/API/etc.... after a dozen projects or so, this built up to a huge arsenal of skills to throw at new projects. Never stop learning.
That said, having had a co-founder for about a week, there has been an obvious increase in productivity, so for that I am truly thankful.
this is what i want to know. I'm not sure and I'm not trying to thread crap but is the title Co-Founder the proper word to use? I'm curious because wouldn't a "founder" be someone who started the company from the beginning? From what I understand Paul joined afterwards (after the angel investing).
Being a founder is about what you do and how much of yourself you are able to put into the company, not when you join. If Chad had hired someone with Paul's skillset and then told him what to do, that is an employer-employee relationship. That doesn't look like what's happening here. They're entering into a partnership as equals to discover and build something new together.
I suppose "partner" is a tempting word to use in this situation, but there may be legal connotations to designating higher-ups as "partners"--in particular, the connotation of being something like an LLP or law firm.
