FoundersList has been a while coming. I probably had the original idea for this some time mid-2018, but my dayjob (along with my startup, SmartAsset) and life got in the way. Fast-forward a little bit, and I've finally phased out my role as CTO at SmartAsset, and decided it was time to get this show on the road.

So here it is — albeit in a rather early and basic form. After all, “if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”.

The idea behind FoundersList is simple: any entrepreneur, business-owner, startup founder, operator, etc will tell you stories about how much time and effort they spent researching service providers, tools, etc; and those times when they didn't do enough research and possibly made less-than-optimal choices.

Think about it — as you build out any business or company, you'll need plenty of different services: lawyers to incorporate, accounts and tax advisors for your finances, office space, business name & logo, cards, signage, a website. And that's just for starters.

As your company grows, you may need payroll providers, medical insurance, HR systems, job-listings and candidate management systems, content/SEO and PR services. You may also need to start managing your captable, board meetings, sales calls and schedules more efficient. You may need patent, immigration or real-estate lawyers. And you might need some other basic stuff: office management and cleaning, office furniture, food and snacks for the office, employee benefits.

The list goes on and on. 

Throughout the 8 years I was CTO at SmartAsset (and even now as I embark on a new startup adventure) I constantly found myself resorting to a handful sources for recommendations or referrals: from Google (🤦🏻‍♂️and the tons of often outdated, biased or purely commercial content) to Twitter, founders' email lists, and slack channels. We were also lucky at SmartAsset to have been part of Y-Combinator in 2012, so had access to YC's mailing-lists and internal "forum" system — that probably proved to be one of the most useful tools for recommendations. The problem with most sources, though, is that they are either transient (Slack, email lists, forums) or disparate and unreliable (Google, Reddit). 

Hence, the idea for FoundersList. While the site is still being developed, and the sections for services-providers, tools, etc are all yet to come, I decided to launch with a few (hopefully useful) sections: News, Events, and Cofounders. 

• The News-feed is a place for anyone to post links to interesting and relevant content online — think of it as HackerNews for Startups & Entrepreneurs. 
• Events is a listing of upcoming startup & business-related events — feel free to add events, or just Contact Me with your event into and I'll add it to the system 
• Finally, Cofounders — since TechCofounder was taken offline a few years ago, there have been very few places to post simple straight-forward cofounder listings. So I thought I'd add one.

New sections will be coming shortly, so stay tuned. Sign up for an account or follow FoundersList on Twitter. And in the meantime, feel free to contact me with any ideas, suggestions, thoughts, etc.