Searching For A Co-Founder Is How You Get A Bad One | 4 VC-Backed Solo Founders

It's been a year since the Solo Founders Program kicked off. Today, the first cohort sits down to discuss building solo, together.

What a year of building taught them: why retention is growth (the smile curve, and the leaky bucket nobody checks), why free users are a "free trend" and not a business, how to kill a good idea to find the better one, and what a room full of other founders actually gets you. Plus the stories they lived before going solo — including co-founding with your dad at 17.

Topics covered:

The prerequisite trap: why searching for a co-founder gets you a bad oneCo-founder failure modes: family, close friends, and misaligned incentivesFinding a co-founder by building (elevating a first hire)Retention is growth: the smile curve and the leaky bucketHype signals vs. paying customers — the 10x questionSolo, together: what a founder community functionally replacesGuests: Aldo Del Valle (new company, prev. Happypath), Chai Choudhary (Workers.io), Namanyay Goel (Giga), Dhravya Shah (Supermemory)