Find a cofounder who already knows what they would own

Why cofounder matching usually fails

The standard cofounder platform pairs you by profile: your background, your interests, what stage you are at. You get an introduction, you have three coffees, and then you discover you disagree about the thing that actually matters — how much of this each of us owns, and what happens if one of us stops showing up.

That conversation is uncomfortable, so it gets deferred. It is also the conversation that determines whether the partnership survives. Deferring it does not make it easier; it just makes it more expensive, because by the time you have it, one of you has already done six months of work.

Junto inverts the order. The equity conversation happens first, in public, before anyone applies.

How to find a cofounder here

If you have the idea: post the project and open a founding role. Give it a title that describes the actual job — "Technical cofounder", "Head chef & operations partner", "Growth lead" — and attach the stake you are willing to give it. Anyone in your city with that skill sees it, and the ones who want those terms raise their hand.

If you want to join something: create a profile with your skills, and browse projects that have opened a role you could fill. You can see the whole team before you apply — who is already in, what they hold, and what is left of the pool. If it does not add up, you keep scrolling, and nobody has wasted a meeting.

You can also swipe on people directly. Right-swipe with an opener, and if it is mutual, a chat opens with both openers already in it — no cold outreach, and no ambiguity about whether the interest was returned.

• Roles carry a specific stake, visible before anyone applies.
• City-scoped, so a match is someone you can actually meet this week.
• Group interviews, so the whole founding team can meet a candidate at once.
• Verified credits from closed projects, so track records are real.

Deciding the split

The hardest number in any founding team is the split. There is no formula that survives contact with reality, but there are a few things that reliably go wrong: splitting evenly to avoid the conversation, giving equity for ideas rather than for work, and handing over a full share on day one with no vesting.

Junto shows the split as a bar on the project card, so it is impossible to be vague about it. Every stake is in basis points and the pools have to total exactly 100% before the agreement can be sent for signature — you cannot ship a cap table that does not add up. If a role carries equity, the agreement requires a vesting schedule.

If you want to think it through before you post, the equity split calculator walks through the inputs that actually matter.

After you find them

A match is not a company. Once your team is seated, the split becomes a signed agreement, and the project moves into a workspace with a checklist for the things that sink new ventures: registering the entity, GST, the bank account, licences. You can hand any of those to the concierge.

If you are pooling money, the treasury guards it — spending above a threshold needs a proposal and a vote, and any member can freeze it if something looks wrong. And if you would rather learn from someone who has done it, you can book a mentor who has run your kind of business.