The night air was heavy with the scent of summer, and the lights of Venice twinkled in the distance. The party was drawing to a close, when our eyes met, and she motioned for me to join her. Drawing closer, her radiant eyes captivated me ....

eeerrrr... ooops, sorry, co-founder?

Yes, co-founder, not cat.

That's taking founders to extreme... but not as silly as it sounds. You have just described Sixaparts` Ben & Mena Trott. The key here was the complimentary skillsets & temperments. One writes codes, the other designs & communicates - a great combination.

I met my co-founder in college ten years ago - he was the first roomate I had when I moved off-campus. At the time I was a web designer (remember back when people who made websites were called 'web designers'? Ha!) and he was programming in this new-fangled language named after coffee, I forget what it was called.

We almost immediately started a startup, which failed almost as immediately. So this is actually our second try, and we're probably both dumber now than we were the first time.

I don't think this question has been asked before (did a quick search ~ http://tinyurl.com/2p998t ). It's worthy of discussion in my view, because without one your toast.

My story is the previous potential co-founder decided that doing a PhD was a fast track to 'better understanding' the problems we had started working on. So much for my powers of persuasion ... hmm now I'm toast. I ask the question for those who might be in the same boat. I've now overcome this hurdle. But I'm still interested in finding out how others solved this problem. Maybe a better questions to ask is "how could (did) you meet your potential co-founder(s)?"

So how could you meet your co-founder(s)?

I was thinking of making a web application, it would be like match.com but for finding co-founders? Do you think that would be viable? Would it work? How would you want it to work?

These folks are trying something similar but it doesn't seem to have much traction http://www.buildv1.com/about

I recently read about partnerup.com but can't join - apparently because I live outside the U.S.

guess not ...

I am curious about that myself. I want to start a company (Coming up to my senior year in college), and haven't met anyone that would be a plausible co-founder yet.

Stay in touch with your former classmates. I met my cofounder in my sophomore year of college, but I didn't know he would be my cofounder until Homecoming 2 years after graduation. I don't think he knew either - the business idea grew out of some consulting work he did after graduation. And he didn't know I was into computers, since at the time I knew him, I was a physics major.

I found a potential co-founder at a Justin.tv Sunday dinner.

Move to San Francisco.