How Do Co-Founders Meet? 17 Startups Tell All

1. Airbnb -- Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia

I moved to San Francisco in early 2007 and found an apartment and a roommate through Craigslist -- that's how I met Joe. He was an engineer at another startup at the time. I later moved out, and Brian -- who knew Joe from the Rhode Island School of Design -- moved in. That was the initial connection for the three of us.

While I lived with Joe, I came to appreciate two things about him -- he worked just as hard as I did, and his skills complemented my own. I have the technical abilities, and he had the creative design skills.

In the summer of 2008, there was a design conference in San Francisco, and there was a hotel shortage. We needed to make rent and thought a good way to make a little additional cash would be to rent out our air mattresses in the apartment. We made a website and got an incredible amount of responses, and we realized we could be on to something.

- Nathan Blecharczyk

Click here to view this gallery.

Jobs and Woz. Larry and Sergey. Jack, Biz and Evan. Mark and Eduardo.

Many of todays most notable and successful tech companies were born not out of one, but two (and sometimes three) noggins. Entrepreneurship can be a long, lonely and hard road, so it help to have a co-founder he serves as a sounding board, a different point of view, a yin to your yang. Hes a beer buddy when the going gets tough, and anoth! er flute to clink when the long-awaited funding comes through. The co-founding trend is going strong, with many of todays up-and-coming startups led by two (or more) complementary individuals. After all, if youre going to go through the startup rollercoaster, why not share the ride with someone?

But how are you supposed to find the person with whom youll hunker down to build the company youre so passionate about? Well, theres TechCoFounder, FounderDating and Founder2Be, for the Match.com types. Then there are hackathons and startup weekends, a great source for CTOs. And theres business school, where you have access to a large pool of bright minds. But you might not even have to go that far or spend that much money you could find the person on Craigslist. Or maybe youre already dating him. Or best friends with her. Or maybe you just need to meet your future co-founder in a random twist of fate.

Mashable spoke with 17 sets of co-founders from some of todays growing startups ZocDoc, Spotify, Airbnb, Foursquare and more to discover how they met, where their idea came from and why they decided to take the plunge together. And the rest, as they say, is history (literally, a lot of them said that).

More About: AirBNB, bump, co-founder, foursquare, networking, rent the runway, spotify, startup, zocdoc

For more Business coverage: