Hi everyone, hope you’re enjoying your week. I’m looking for a possible cofounder or early employee (would receive equity). I’ve spent the last 10 months overhauling the social media/digital engagement experience to build a unified ecosystem powered by automations, ML feedback loops, and personalization built around a multi-modal search engine.
There are 1-2 competitors right now trying to build the same future but have terrible, bloated teams, limited product engineering experience and are just brute forcing with funds and garbage ideas. My project is built at an enterprise grade scale. I’ve worked at Oracle/Microsoft/FAANG+ my entire corporate career and have an MBA from USC.
Currently, a colleague of mine at work (Double Carnegie Mellon CS, Stanford research, AI/ML scientist) has been the only person interested in speaking to me, and he’s super excited and impressed by my thoroughness in design, scale, and infrastructure/data considerations. I’ve given him 1 month to give me an answer on working on this with me as a true cofounder, even though I’ve built all the product, I value his feedback, work ethic (has already conceptually worked on things) and our vibes. We schedule hour long zooms and regularly run to 3-4 hours talking future and fun nerdy stuff.
I’m building this team and company very intentionally for a big raise. Targeting 5-10M for seed/series A for 2-3 year Burn. Each person I’ve spoken to, has been to ensure they are a net ++ to the company and ability to sell the vision/team.
Now I don’t know if he’s going to agree or not (I gave him a very generous equity package and salary upon raise) so I need contingencies in place. Him and I together check all boxes for successful unicorn build.
School Pedigree: both USC and CM are top 15 hubs for unicorns (sorry we’re not Stanford or Harvard grads)
Successful Comp: 73% of successful unicorns are 2 Male Cofounders (13% 1 Male, then mixed male female and lastly females at 1-2%)
Education: I’m an Econ/Finance grad (19% of unicorn founders), he’s CS (24%)
Experience: most successful founders are below 40 with 10+ years of domain expertise (engineering, business, Product management are the highest weighted success metrics). We check boxes for the highest 2 percentiles.
Job Title - Software Engineer and Business/Sales are the highest correlation to success. He’s a SWE, I’ve done tech sales and consulting for my entire career, before that I had raised 250k for a project in college that failed.
On the chance he gets cold-feet, I’m looking for another co-founder or early employee (#1). We’re not quitting our high paying jobs until we raise funds, I spend 20+ hours on my weekend building this thing (over 300 hours in on this build). If interested you must also meet similar criteria for your CV/resume/experience in order to be a strength and positive to team perception and intelligence.
Context on Product: 90% done, I’ve built it all by myself, im talking full ML feedback system, data governance, registry and annotation, creative/music functions. All standard social functions (messaging, posting, drafting, shares, etc.) UGC and creator ecosystems. Full architecture (AWS - S3, Elastic, RDS) and Redis w/FastAPI middleware connections. I don’t really need the help technically, but I want someone who can improve, innovate, iterate and go down this journey to unicorn with me.