# Founder FAQ: How did you meet your co-founder?

**Author:** Y Combinator
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JD-founder-faq-how-did-you-meet-your-co-founder
**YouTube ID:** IyhLAbqDw0k

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We asked 50+ founders from YC’s latest batch the same question: How did you meet your co-founder?

## Transcript

how did you meet your co-founder yeah it's a funny story so uh do you want to take this one [Music] so we went to school college College college they're both French but actually we met at Stanford in California week two of MIT we went to UNI together I was a freshman she was a junior I was the first friend that I made in my high school we met at Jewish Sleepaway Camp when we were 10 years old you know we

have no overlapping skills she is the technical co-founder and I kind of handle everything else product marketing sales growth business Ops I think a lot of our day-to-day is built on the trust that we've built over 20 years of friendship we did a choir together in high school the shared experience was great but also we have exactly the opposite set of skills in the like software engineering space like size got the product the front end and the back end and I've got machine learning the cloud architecture so it was like a perfect match on that end through a mutual friend through friends skiing

yeah mutual friend Allison took us in a group ski trip and Stan just started mooching me off for rides yeah that's right not only mooching you for rides but also also chewing your ear off on my startup idea yeah so we were both co-workers we worked together Lucas and I used to work at the same company we met Airbnb about seven years ago we shared our passion of like how do we decarbonize our lives and we're like What if we did this like full time and then we decided to quit our jobs and interview folks and try to understand

again why it was in the building the carbonization space moving quicker and this is where we landed Alex and I met in 2016 when we were both doing internships in China we were teammates yeah yeah both Engineers on the same team at bolt we were working together in the same lab for about two and a half years on the project and how did you realize like okay this is the person I want to work with probably when we were both there on um Thanksgiving I've only done March Madness once in my life and that one times will be Microsoft and I won somehow so this

guy's a third best bracket so he's looking up like who the heck beat me and that's how he found me and then we've been friends ever since we're sisters and also co-founders we are married we work together as a side project but then it grew into a startup and it felt like just working with my best friend got married and became co-founders this is probably our fourth company that we've worked on together attempted together so I mashed with Ray's best friend on Tinder well I used Tinder not today not

to date but more like LinkedIn during uh covered times how did you meet your co-founder uh through the YC co-founder dating uh not dating a co-founder matching platform through YC so through the co-founder matching platform we met on the YC co-founder matching platform it felt very familiar having used the dating apps before some swiping right some swiping left finding someone who was would share that energy for building in the trucking space was really important um and also someone who just had a really strong track record of

um delivering on technical products so managed to find all that in my co-founder we met in person and kind of hit it off and took it from there we met while working at project 44. I think the thing I remember most from that dinner is Armin telling me he had pet chickens I was like this guy is quite interesting and then from there I just learned about all the awesome stuff he was doing in ml Ops and yeah we got to talking about building a company together yeah I was you know before that it really hesitant and like fearful of like actually taking that leap of like just quitting leaving

everything behind sacrificing everything and like just going for the plunge it really took someone like Ali to to just convince me give me that confidence to just like go for it [Music]
