Finding cofounders and the “good idea filter”

This post originally appeared as part of a two part serieson greenhornconnect.com

If you are contemplating joining someone you've just met to form a company, there’s a tendency to use a ‘good idea filter’. After meeting for the first time, I've heard potential co-founders describe their impressions of each other as some form of “They're smart. We definitely clicked. I could work with them but I'm not sure I buy their idea."

It seems like a lot of potential co-founders are looking for the obvious, lightning-strike idea to connect together and start executing. Very few companies begin with such a foundation. Most ideas only seem obvious in hindsight.

"Everybody I know is calling me an idiot, what do I do?" and my comment is, well, you thank 'em, cause if they all thought you were right, you'd be too late.

- Scott Rafer - CEO Lookery, Venture Voice Show #11

Given the entrepreneurial networking events geared at connecting co-founders, the primary way we try to come together is by pitching each other. There’s a whole mythology that’s developed around the elevator pitch, and while they have their utility, pitches are not necessarily a good way to evaluate if someone is a good fit as a co-founder (unless, of course, you're looking for someone who is good at pitching).

There are many reasons why initial ideas, and idea pitches, are not a good way to find a potential co-founder.

1. We are terrible at evaluating startup ideas

What constitutes a successful startup is the product of multiple interrelated unknowns, the quality of the initial idea being only one very small element. Even people who make their living determining the probability of startup success, early stage venture capitalists, usually don’t list the initial idea as a primary evaluating factor. You’ll hear more about the team and it’s ability to execute as well as the potential market than the idea.

2. Startups rarely achieve success with their founding idea.

Most startups pivot on their initial idea multiple times before arriving at what’s the really good idea. The thing startups find success with usually has little in common with their original idea. Implicit in this, most startup ideas are inherently flawed. The startup process is not one of executing on an obvious "good idea", it's one of exploring the inevitable flaws in an idea, fixing them, and when you can't, shifting to a new idea.

3. We are terrible at pitching.

We're not as good at communicating our ideas as we think we are. We are affected by the "curse of knowledge". Chip and Dan Heath offer a great explanation of this in an interview with Guy Kawasaki - The Stickiness Aptitude Test (SAT) and Ten Questions with Chip and Dan Heath.

People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. [...] when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. [...] Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly.

4. We are terrible listeners.

If the idea is even remotely novel and not a meaningless rehash (twitter for dogs!), it is going to take more than an elevator pitch or a 15 minute conversation to understand it. Hearing an idea over a beer and social conversation means you will likely only absorb about 10% of it. When listening to pitches to determine if they're "good ideas" what we're really evaluating is the communication of the idea.

Conclusion

Inability to communicate or evaluate an idea in a short pitch is not necessarily a good reason to filter out potential co-founders. As Chip and Dan Heath explain, often times those with the deepest domain knowledge and most innovative solutions are precisely the worst at pitching. Even if the idea is communicated clearly, we are not very good at linking ideas with startup success potential. Networking events and short conversations are an extremely inefficient way to communicate true innovation and the possibility for a startup venture.

In many cases, though, all we have to evaluate potential co-founders are these short meetings and pitches. In the second part, I'll discuss some tips for framing ideas differently with regards to potential co-founders. We need to put startup ideas in the right context, as ways to start the conversation. If we're serious about starting something together, we need to begin finding ways to evaluate how well we might work together, evolving ideas, rather than judging them statically.