The catalyst for me was joining a couple of communities. The best for me was Cambrian (https://www.cambrianhq.com/) because I am generally interested in fintech.
This is why I limited the meetings to 30min and made sure to ask explicitly about what they are looking for.
If they phrase it as "early employee" or "head of eng" or anything other than cofounder, you're looking at a relationship where you are paid for your time, not respected as a cofounder
I'm very opposed to the idea that founders need to eat ramen for 4+ years when raising venture money, and I think VCs are slowly warming up to that fact.
But, yes, you will take much less salary than at a normal engineering gig.
I think 100-150k is relatively palatable. 150-200 is possible. Above 200 almost unheard of at pre-seed / seed stage.
The irony is to hire your first engineer, you'll almost certainly need to shell out 200k+.
I also have a wife and 2 kids, so I am looking for a cofounder that can respect this and give the salary needed to live a decent life.
Yeah - I considered this. There were probably 10% of people I could tell that wouldn't lead anywhere.
Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened.
I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.
The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)
This is a common misconception. If someone says they want to bring you in as a cofounder, they almost always will think of you as a significant equity partner.
There are certainly advantages to both routes. I think there are a lot of business skills that are just as important, possibly even more important than the technical skills.
fwiw, my original plan was to be a solo founder. I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.
I have a rubric of sorts I use to rank people and ideas. This makes it very easy to avoid the dilbert scenario.
Some of these people are very advanced (have contracts / LOIs, MVP, funding)