How to find a co-founder: where to look and what to ask first

The idea behind Satispay came out of a chat between friends. Alberto Dalmasso and Dario Brignone, both from Cuneo, had very different jobs: one did marketing for an asset manager in Turin, the other was an IT consultant for Eni in Kazakhstan. Samuele Pinta joined shortly after, and at the end of 2012 they quit their jobs to work on it.

Few of us have a group of friends like that waiting in the wings. This guide is about how to find a co-founder when you don’t: where to look (in Italy first, then online), how to test someone before you commit, and the ten questions to put in writing before anyone owns a share.

Do you really need a co-founder?

Not always. Solo founders are a growing crowd: in Carta’s 2026 Founder Ownership Report, about 36% of the startups founded on its platform in 2025 had one founder, up from 31% the year before, and the share has doubled in a decade.

Funding tells a different story. According to Carta’s Solo Founders Report, published in December 2025, single-founder companies raised just 14.7% of the cash that went into priced equity rounds in 2024 (rounds where investors buy shares at an agreed price). Those are American figures, but the reasoning travels: investors back teams, because one person rarely covers product, sales and the hundred jobs in between.

Here’s a blunt test. Think about the five years ahead and name the job you can’t do, or simply won’t. If it’s building the product or selling it, you need a partner, not a freelancer. One more thing: if your idea is an invention, read how to patent an idea in Italy before you describe it to strangers at events.

Where to find a co-founder in Italy

Start where builders already spend their days. Universities are the obvious place, and not only for students. PoliHub, the deep tech hub of the Politecnico di Milano, runs open calls for students, researchers and startup teams; it has been active since 2013 and its site counts more than 215 startups founded by Politecnico researchers and students. In Turin the equivalent is I3P, the Politecnico di Torino’s incubator. An incubator helps very early teams with space, mentors and contacts.

Then come the Start Cup competitions. PNICube, the network of Italian universities and academic incubators, has 61 members in 18 regions and counts 17 active regional competitions. The winners go on to the Premio Nazionale per l’Innovazione, which in 2026 takes place in Bari on 3 and 4 December. Even if you don’t win, you spend months next to engineers, researchers and designers who are already thinking like founders. That’s the real prize. If you’re still studying, our guide on how to start a startup at university covers the rest.

Off campus, try coworking communities such as Talent Garden in Milan, founder meetups like Startup Grind, and hackathons, where a single weekend shows how someone behaves when the deadline is real. And think about the people you’ve already worked with. A former colleague has seen you on a bad Monday, and you’ve seen them, which tells you more than any networking evening.

How to find a co-founder online

Y Combinator’s Co-Founder Matching is the best-known option, and it has been open to the public since July 2021. Joining costs nothing, it lives inside Startup School, and your company doesn’t need to be a YC one. You fill in a profile, browse people whose skills, interests and location match what you asked for, and send invitations.

A few months after launch YC shared what its users wanted. One figure stands out: 80% of founders who don’t do engineering were looking for a co-founder who does. If you can’t code, expect competition. Show up to the first call with something solid, like a set of customer interviews that validate the idea, a waiting list, or years of experience in the sector you want to change.

Another figure from that data: 79% of founders wanted to know how many hours a co-founder could commit. Work out your own figure before you start scrolling.

Test before you commit: the trial project

A great first coffee proves very little. What YC recommends to matched founders is simple: take on a small trial project together, put a time limit on it, and agree expectations and goals up front. It’s an audition for both of you.

Imagine meeting Marta, a developer, at a hackathon in Turin. You agree on six weeks together. She builds a clickable prototype. You book fifteen calls with potential customers. Every Friday you sit down and compare what each of you actually finished. By week four you’ll know how she reacts to a missed deadline, and she’ll know how you take bad news. For the prototype part, see how to build an MVP without coding.

Small and real is the right size. Nobody gets equity during the trial, though it’s worth agreeing in a short written note that whatever you build will belong to the company if you both go ahead.

The 10 questions to settle before you sign

Go through them over a long dinner, then write the answers down. Disagreeing now costs an evening. In two years it costs lawyers, and sometimes a friendship.

1. Money. Work out how much each of you will put in, and when anyone starts drawing a salary.
2. Time. Decide if you’ll both work on it full-time from day one. If one of you keeps a job for now, write down when that ends.
3. Roles. Settle who is CEO, who owns the product and who signs contracts with customers.
4. Decisions. Pick the person with the last word on big disagreements, and agree how a tie gets broken.
5. Leaving. Say one of you walks away in year one. Decide now what happens to their equity, meaning their share of ownership.
6. Personal runway. Count the months each of you can live without a salary. Twelve against three is a real mismatch, and it affects when to quit your job for a startup.
7. Ambition. A profitable company of twenty people, or a race for venture capital and a big exit? Both are fine. Mixing the two isn’t.
8. Location. Milan, Lisbon or fully remote? And what if a key customer asks one of you to move?
9. IP. Who owns the code, the brand, the patent application? It should be the company, not whoever happened to type it.
10. Values. Decide what you won’t do to grow, and test it on a concrete case, like a client who offers to pay in cash if you skip the invoice.

Red flags, and why everything goes in writing

Some warning signs show up in the first weeks. These are the ones worth taking seriously:

• They want half the company before doing any work, or a big slice for ‘the idea’.
• Every question about hours gets a vague answer.
• They won’t sign even a one-page note on who owns what, ‘because we’re friends’.
• Their earlier partnerships all ended badly, and always through the other person’s fault.
• Nothing they say can be checked: no code to look at, no references, no old colleague who’ll vouch for them.

If the answers are good, put them on paper properly. In an Italian SRL (a limited liability company) there are two documents. The statuto, the company’s articles, applies to anyone who buys into the company. The patto parasociale, or shareholders’ agreement, is a private contract that binds only the partners who sign it, so it’s the natural home for the more personal rules: who can sell, when, and what happens to someone who leaves.

The clause that matters most is vesting. Shares are earned over time, so a co-founder who quits after six months doesn’t leave with a third of the company. The numbers, the cliff and the way it works in an SRL are in our next step, how to split equity between co-founders.

Your co-founder checklist

• Write two paragraphs: what you need from a partner, and what you bring yourself.
• Choose two Italian channels (an incubator, a Start Cup, a community) and one online platform, then turn up every week.
• Plan a trial project of four to six weeks, with a goal you can measure.
• Sit down together with the ten questions, and keep the written answers.
• Call one former colleague of theirs, and offer one of yours.
• Sign a shareholders’ agreement with vesting while the company is still worth very little.

Want to see where this step sits among the others? The beginner’s map from zero to first round puts every stage in order.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Before you sign a shareholders’ agreement, ask a lawyer, notary or accountant to check it.