Krooko vs YC Co-Founder Matching

4 min read

Y Combinator's Co-Founder Matching, run through Startup School, is the largest structured pool of people actively looking for a co-founder. It's free, well-organized, and the profiles are unusually detailed for a matching tool.

The catch is that it's built around a single, fairly narrow flow: fill out a profile, get matched, message inside the platform. There's no public feed, no way to be discovered outside a direct match, and nothing built for finding a business partner rather than a startup co-founder specifically.

Krooko covers the same core need — describing what you're building and finding the person to build it with — but adds a public card anyone can browse or be discovered through, a feed for posting real progress instead of just a static profile, and a Business side for people looking for suppliers, clients or partner businesses rather than a co-founder.

If you want a large, YC-branded pool and don't mind a closed-match flow, Startup School is a strong option. If you'd rather be discoverable beyond a single match, show real activity over time, and have the option to use the same account for business partnerships later, Krooko is built for that.

Both are free, so there's no real cost to trying both — post a card on Krooko and fill out a Startup School profile, and see which one actually gets you a reply first.