How to find a co-founder
Hey everyone! 👋
Welcome back to Spark Teen Weekly. Each week, we'll send you handmade, hand-picked, and handpacked content on teen entrepreneurship, investing, creating, and more.
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💌 From the community
Last year, Ishaan Maheshwari co-founded Measure, a no-code ML tool for visualizing business analytics. At 15 years old, he’s currently an On Deck fellow and a product designer at Airfoil and Sellerant.
We asked him what his advice for aspiring teen entrepreneurs is:
Honestly the first thing is to just start. There's no course or special certificate that can help you start a company or anything. I feel like a lot of teens spend way too much time pondering about what to do, or what you have to learn. You can easily pick up the skills as you go.
Something I also cannot stress enough, talk to as many people as you can. Being young is literally the best time to get people’s attention because you stand out from the crowd. It's harder to do that as you get older. So just grow your network. I sorta just stumbled around in meetings, talking to different people with different backgrounds. Some were VCs like partners at Sequoia, some were angel investors, some were employees/founders. When we applied to the Village Global Accelerator, that actually ended up in them paying our tuition for On Deck lol.
🤝 How to find a co-founder
Trying to find someone to build your startup with?
In his podcast, Naval says to look for someone with high intelligence, energy and integrity.
Intelligence is an obvious criteria, but without energy, all you have is a human search engine. High energy individuals are motivated to do what it is they like to do. In other words, someone with intelligence and energy can direct their smarts to a specific area and work to drive you both in the right direction. However, without integrity, all you have is a smart and motivated crook. Integrity will prevent you from being cheated by your partner in crime.
🌟 How to choose what to work on
Got an idea for a startup or side project?
👉 Look for opportunities that pack 10 years of learning into six months.
👉 Choose projects that, even if you fail, teach you a skill and expose you to more people.
Resources & opportunities
On Deck Longevity Biotech - Applications just launched for On Deck’s newest program for people who want to help build or invest in longevity startups. Apply now if you want to live longer!
The Creator Library - The ultimate resource for digital creators. Although it has a focus on YouTube video-making, you’ll find tools and tips that’ll help you no matter your medium.
That's it for this week!
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Mei & Jodi from the Spark Teen team