What Love is Blind can teach you about finding a cofounder

Who they select

The core premise of Love is Blind means that cast members are screened for shared levels of commitment. The show is not about dating, but is focused on finding individuals who are ready to get married now. If you find someone you’re interested in, you’re committing to a wedding four weeks later.

One of the challenges of dating in the wild is that it can be hard to know if you are both looking for the same desired outcomes. If one of you is looking for a life partner and one of you is looking for a quick fling it’s potentially a waste of time on both sides.

This is worth bearing in mind when you start your cofounder search. Even if they are the perfect cofounder for you on paper, if they don’t share the same level of commitment you’re wasting your time.

We hear this story all the time where an individual thinks they have found a friend or colleague to cofound with. They appear really excited to get going, but then they get a job offer, or ‘life gets in the way’ and you realise they’re not as committed as you are. You end up back at square one as a sole founder again.

This is why at EF we screen each individual carefully for their level of commitment. They need to want to found a startup right now.

LiB creates a time limited testing period with specific goals

When finding a cofounder, or romantic partner, it’s normal to have a drawn out testing period — apparently the average is 4.9 years pre-marriage. On average people have two serious relationships before they find their spouse. That’s potentially many, many wasted years with incompatible life partners.

In startups, most founders spend at least months ‘testing’ the relationship before incorporating and joining a cap table together.

In LiB they create an environment that cuts 4.9 years to four weeks. They do this with intense and time limited testing periods, each answering a specific question:

1. In the Pods for a week — are you willing to commit to an engagement (without ever seeing their face)?
2. On holiday for a week — are you willing to move in together after this holiday?
3. Living together for a couple of weeks — are you willing to get married after living together?
4. A wedding after 4 weeks

By having selected individuals who are both actively seeking the same thing — marriage — LiB enables alignment around specific outcomes that get the couple to the next stage of their relationship. If they aren’t willing to move to the next stage, there is a clear break up point.

This is what we encourage founders to do at EF. We create specific, and tight, deadlines to encourage individuals to actively test each other against specific goals:

1. One week after the programme starts you’re expected to have chosen a cofounder and be in testing mode.
2. You have an eight week period to find and test cofounders. If you do not find one during this period, you leave the programme.
3. Investment Committee is just 6 weeks after team building ends so you are pushed to make very quick progress together.

These deadlines may seem artificial but they act as forcing mechanisms to create new social norms. These new social norms reduce ‘wasted’ unproductive time that doesn’t align with your goal of getting married/finding a cofounder.

LiB creates new social norms around conversation

How often have you heard “never talk about getting married on your first date”? But, what happens if your reason for the date is to find a life partner that you do marry? This social norm means that important questions that potentially highlight incompatibility are pushed later down the line when both parties have more invested.

In LiB, the time pressure and shared level of commitment means that questions like:

• “Do you want to have kids?”
• “Does it matter that I earn a lot less than you?” and
• “Where do you want to live?”

happen within the first couple of hours, if not days.

In this clip Shaine and Natalie talk about whether and how they would buy a house together. “We need to get really aligned on our financial milestones” says Natalie “we need a 401k (pension)”. “I dont believe in 401ks” says Shaine to her horror.

This conversation happened 3 weeks after they first met. Can you imagine doing this in the normal dating world?

For potential cofounders I would encourage you to have the ‘awkward’ conversations up front. What are your red lines? What are the things you need to have a shared understanding on and shared belief for the company to be viable?

I would suggest early conversations about:

• Who is going to be CEO? What role will each person have?
• What equity split are you going to agree on?
• Where are you going to work and what working norms are you going to have e.g., times? [I’m always amazed at how often this is a stumbling block for new teams!]

Often potential cofounders default to conversations about shared values and interests — while useful, these are not the areas we see cofounders falling out on most frequently.

LiB creates ‘work tests’ to evaluate the productivity of the relationship

As unromantic as this may seem, a married couple will spend far more time discussing running and building a life together than on the more typically romantic parts of a relationship. Marriage is a legal contract that shares all financial upside and downside, alongside potentially the creation and raising of children. These are complex tasks and I’d argue you want to marry someone that enables you to be a highly productive team in these endeavours.

In LiB, they ask the couples to complete certain tasks. Including sharing household duties together when they move in, meeting each other’s families and organising a wedding together.

By completing tasks together each individual is gathering information on their potential partnership’s productivity and whether they want to work alongside this individual for the rest of their life. This is very different from ‘normal’ dating activities such as dinners, holidays and hanging out together which can be highly enjoyable, but may not highlight challenges in working styles.

When finding a cofounder, it can be tempting to stay in the ‘safe mode’ of talking about ideas and having long chats about what you want to create. In reality, the most effective way to accurately assess a cofounder and your compatibility is to immediately start working on something, together, that you really care about. If you don’t care about the idea you’re trying to implement it’s unlikely to highlight where you are misaligned as you’re less likely to fight for your point of view.

The best teams that form at EF are highly productive from day one. We say ‘productivity is traction for teams’ where each individual feels more productive because they’re working alongside the other person.

What is LiB missing?

In my view, LiB is missing one key ingredient to improve its outcomes. In the last season they got two married couples from 6 engagements. Not a bad stat considering they were strangers four weeks before.

But, each participant only had the chance to test one other individual. In the reunion show it looks like Kyle would have liked the chance to experiment with his second choice Deepti and maybe Shane and Shaina would have liked to see if they can make it work.

At EF, we create an environment that allows individuals to ‘break up’ and then reform quickly with other potential founders. Often when finding a cofounder in the wild the opportunity cost of breaking up seems huge as you have no other person lined up. At EF, when you break up you have access to a pool of 50+ other active, screened individuals that you can lean into testing and having hard conversations with the very next day.