Co-Founder Jamming

If you haven’t already, it’s probably a good idea to read the introductory post first – it sets up the background.

Aspiring startup founders without sufficiently broad existing networks need to find co-founders. This appears to be a point of considerable stress. Questions of commitment, work-ethic, skills, equity distribution and the like need to be addressed by potential co-founders, and this is hard to do on the basis of limited acquaintance.

How is this currently achieved? The accepted practice seems to be to attend tech networking events. These are many and various – at least around existing hubs, like the Silicon Roundabout area in London, and these offer regular opportunities of several kinds to get to know people, to broadcast your ideas, needs and interests. These are effective and productive events, but of course, a great conversation is not perhaps sufficient – you need more; but in each case, with each individual, you are starting more-or-less from scratch.

Co-Founder Jamming is an attempt to add another type of event to the established types. If effective, it will do several things;

• enable groups of potential co-founders to work together over a period of a day/couple of days (or even more), in a comfortable, managed space (both physical and digital):
  • on the basis of complete clarity about issues such as NDAs, IP, equity etc.
  • typically, without forward commitment arising from participation – although it will be up to the session proposer to choose exactly what the deal is.
• enable individuals to develop a community-based reputation based on their contributions to sessions – informally (and potentially formally, with on-line reviews etc via anonymised and moderated group reviews).
• enable ideas people to propose ideas (at whatever level of detail they choose to present) to an informed community of potential co-founders.
  • ideas which garner sufficient interest will be eligible for supported sessions
  • idea proposers are free to arrange their own sessions with people who have expressed interest without  reference to the organisers

Looked at in one way, such a service will enable crowd-sourcing of mini-hackathons, around ideas that need only to appeal to small groups of individuals, and that are perhaps a stage further developed than the typical hackathon product. 

OK, that’s enough for an outline. Please do comment, or get in touch directly, if this is of any interest.