It may not appeal but I took up ultramarathons a couple of years ago. On the multi-day ones (e.g. Marathon des Sables) you meet some terrific people with the kind of insanely driven mentality that chewing glass and staring into the abyss demands. They've also typically got a bit of personal runway - so can bare financial risk of a startup.

That has to be the most fascinating piece of startup advice I have ever read.

Alternatively, you can identify the same set of people without actually running the ultra by looking for people who descend stairs backwards.

Not sure if this was your intention, but your comment came off as somewhat snarky - a theme best reserved for reddit.

It was not advice - but an observation offered as a data-point. You can indeed meet people that run ultra-marathons without running one by going to meetups, fb group events, etc.

FWIW I thought it was a genuine comment. That's really specific, interesting advice in finding the sort of people who'd make good co-founders.

Indeed my comment was genuine. FWIW, I also recently ran my first ultra.

Yeah, Rik's totally right. As a technical person you control the proverbial board. Go out, meet (great, non-crazy) people...talk about your ideas. Have in mind the type or skill set of the co-founder you want though, early stage everyone needs to bring hard skills, IMHO.

Looking at your profile, as a technical person you'll be a lot more in-demand than someone non-technical. Go to meetups and talk about your ideas online, people will naturally come out of the woodwork the more you talk about your high-in-the-sky plans.

Here's an idea for someone to build up. Make a dating site for founders and cofounders. That would do really well in SV. Probably could even run in real life speed dating.

That's not exactly my field of interest but I'd sign up for something like that when I get out of college and need to finally get to building things.

There are already a bunch of these actually. I think cofounderslab is the most well known but there are a bunch of others.

If I was to set you homework, it'd be to talk to 10 founders on your idea. See if they think it'd be useful. Talk to founders in SV and other cities (and other countries).

Do the research before building anything, otherwise you could be wasting your energy on something people don't want.

Probably already been done, but free idea?

An internet "dating site" for startup co-founders to meet on (you could have the whole shebang - ratings, chat, profiles).

Maybe something like LinkedIn meets Match.com, with a sprinkle of YC thrown in?

Actually, email matching might be suitable for this problem. I did a project for matching flatmates a while ago. [1] Was trying to leverage a user's facebook connections etc. to create better matches (e.g. 2nd degree connections). If anyone is interested in taking it over/working on it let me know. [1] http://www.flatmate.io/