Founders spend months choosing a co-founder and roughly an hour actually working with them first. That ratio is backwards.
Interviews measure the wrong thing
An interview measures how well somebody talks about work. A founding relationship is about how somebody behaves when the work is difficult, the deadline has moved, and nobody senior is watching.
You can learn a lot from a resume and a portfolio. What you cannot learn is whether somebody will tell you the truth on the week the plan stops working.
Four things that predict a fit
In rough order of how much they matter:
- Do they do what they said they would do, at the size they said they would do it?
- When they get stuck, do they ask for help or go quiet?
- Can they argue about the work without making it personal?
- When the scope changes, do they adapt or dig in?
None of these show up in a conversation. All of them show up inside two weeks of real work.
The first sprint
This is why we run one before anyone commits, and why the community exists. Pick a single shared goal that both sides agree matters. Make it small enough to finish. Then watch.
Not to grade anybody. To find out whether you enjoy being in the same room as this person when the room is slightly on fire.
Some pairs discover they work well together and want to continue. Some discover they do not, and that is a cheap discovery made at the right time, before a company, a bank account and a friendship are riding on it.
What to do with the answer
If the sprint goes well, you have evidence. You are no longer guessing about a stranger. You can talk about roles, splits and terms with something real behind the conversation.
If it does not go well, you part company with your time as the only cost. That is a much better outcome than the alternative, which is finding out six months into a company you cannot easily undo.
The interview is not useless. It just answers a different question. Use it to decide who to work with for two weeks. Use the two weeks to decide everything else.
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