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Tell HN: I'm looking for a cofounder (B2B workflow automation)

Article news.ycombinator.com

Tell HN: I'm looking for a cofounder (B2B workflow automation)

Hi folks, my name’s Alex Kolchinski, and I’m looking for a cofounder to build an AI-powered B2B software company with.

A bit about me:

-I grew up programming and worked full-time as an engineer for a year after high school.

-I did a BS/MS in CS with an AI focus at UChicago.

-I was an APM at Google.

-I did half of a PhD at Stanford and did research in the Stanford AI Lab, publishing three papers — https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wuMJ27MAAAAJ

-I dropped out of Stanford to start Mezli (YC W21) and led it as CEO. We launched a popular autonomous restaurant, but went out of business after our Series A fundraise fell through. I raised $4M (but failed to raise the additional ~$10M we needed), led a team of ~30, and ran several functions including finance and marketing. Google Mezli for news, reviews, etc., and you can see a video of the tech here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV2I9XwcEZE

-While shutting down Mezli over the past ~6 months, I’ve built and launched two products solo — a B2C utility app (www.readtome-app.com) and a B2B workflow automation product that just crossed $10K/month in revenue.

The aforementioned workflow automation product lets insurance agencies get quotes from carriers via API call in cases when quotes are otherwise only obtainable by filling out long web forms. Currently, agents spend as much as half their time clicking through these web forms. This product automatically fills them out with some help from GPT4, letting agents spend more of their time selling insurance.

Despite the early revenue, I’m still deciding whether to stay in this niche or pivot to a different one (I’m exploring a few others) — which will mostly depend on where I find the highest potential to scale to $1M+ in revenue within a year or two. My goal is to get to $1M+ with a narrow “wedge” product that’s quick to sell, then grow outwards from there, responding to inevitable shifts in the landscape of the software industry, including changes in the capabilities of AI, as they emerge.

I’ve been navigating this process solo so far, but I’d prefer to bring on a partner. Working as a team is more fun, it often yields better decisions, and it’s a lot faster than doing everything alone.

And if I’m going to bring on a cofounder, I’d like to do it now while the direction of the company is still up in the air. This way, we can discover the long-term direction of the company together, and it’ll feel like our baby, not just mine.

As far as who I’m looking to work with, I can see one of two arrangements working well:

1) I’m CEO, you’re CTO. I focus on selling, you focus on building, but I’ll help build when appropriate. You need to be a top-notch builder (of software) with a history of shipping things quickly.

2) I’m CTO, you’re CEO. You sell, I build. Because I’ve been the CEO of a startup that had some temporary success, I have a pretty high bar for this one: either you should have a previous exit as a startup CEO, or you should be a veteran of an industry that you can immediately start making sales in.

Either way, we should mesh well personally and professionally, and it wouldn’t hurt if you have previous experience working at startups.

A couple of other things:

-I feel very strongly about working in-person together, most days of the week, most weeks of the year, in or near San Francisco.

-At this stage of the game I’d be looking to split equity equally, with one extra share to the CEO to break ties. I also prefer a longer vesting schedule than 4 years to align founder incentives for the long-term.

Interested? Reach out — I’m at alex@kolch.in — and please include a brief summary of what you’ve done in the past and why you’re interested in working together.

And for more details, see my blog post and video here: https://alexkolchinski.com/2024/02/27/im-looking-for-a-cofounder/

Discussion 3 comments · 1 points · kolchinski · 2024-02-28
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