Founder FAQ: How did you meet your co-founder?
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 You wanna take this one? Never done this before. So we met in school. College. College.
College. College. College. We'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.
Sai 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, 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 twenty 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, Si's got the product, the front end, and the back end, and I've got the machine learning, the cloud architecture, so it was like a perfect match on that end. Through a mutual friend. Through friends. Skiing. Yeah.
So our mutual friend Allison took us on a group ski trip and Stan just started mooching me off for rides. That's how we met. Yeah. That's right. Not only mooching you for rides, but also chewing your ear off on my startup idea.
Yeah. So we were both coworkers. We worked together. Lukes and I used to work at the same company. We met at Airbnb about seven years ago. We shared our passion of like how do we decarbonize.
our lives. And we're like, what if we do 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 decarbonization 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. Yep. 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 wanna work with? Probably when we were both there on.
Thanksgiving.
Yeah. That could be that's fair. I've only done March Madness once in my life and that one time was with Microsoft and I won somehow. So this guy is the third best bracket. 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 worked 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. Attempted together. So I matched with Ray's best friend on Tinder. Well, I used Tinder. Not to date.
Not to date, but more like LinkedIn during COVID times. How did you meet your cofounder?
Through the YC cofounder dating not dating app, cofounder matching platform. Through YC. So through the cofounder matching platform. We met on the YC cofounder 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, and also someone who just had a really strong track record of.
delivering on technical products. So managed to find all of that in my cofounder. We met in person and kind of hit it off and took it from there. We met while working at project forty four. I think the thing I remember most from that dinner is Armen 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,.
really hesitant and like fearful of like actually taking that leap of like just quitting, leaving everything behind, sacrificing everything, and, just going for the plunge. It really took someone like Ali to to just convince me and give me that confidence to just, go for it.
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