Or, you know, find a business guy as a partner. People from investment banking, consulting, venture capital, and private equity backgrounds have years of experience dealing with $50M - $10B companies and know markets (hey, look, the first thing VCs look at when making investment decisions) and their soft spots intimately. They also tend to have cash that can pay for an apartment and food. They're hybrid co-founders/angels.
Or, alternatively, let yourself be found. Some of those people are just as entrepreneurial as you are, and desperate to find a competent hacker to work with. You are probably already friends with some such people. Ask around.
Do you speak from experience? I'd be fairly hesitant dealing with anyone who came from finance who I didn't have a pre-existing relationship with, just because the proportion of sharks is much, much higher there, and their political instincts and grasp of the relevant corporate structures are likely to be so much better than yours. They'll be able to screw you over if they decide to, and they're a lot more likely to.
Well, from my experience, I don't have any particular experience, insight, or ability to screw people over. Seriously, if you take a napkin and say 50/50 on the napkin, it'll hold up in court. But I'm a Democrat, so I'm not evil. :)
I tried for months to try to find a technical co-founder and couldn't. I gave up and hired a consulting firm to build the initial version of Dawdle because I wanted to get started now now now. They did a fine job, but it would have been much more cost efficient - and we could have iterated much sooner - if I had been able to find a technical co-founder.
Look, I get that hackers have people with supposedly great ideas all the time, but there are hundreds of people with actual insight and seed capital who would kill to find someone they could trust. But both sides don't trust each other - hackers are scared of getting screwed over (which happens, but rarely) and biz types are scared the hacker will walk away (what usually happens; hackers have actual skills that people will pay large sums of cash money for, even in a downturn).
How to solve? Seriously, best way is to put it in your HN profile. "Looking for a biz co-founder; looking for a tech co-founder". The signal/noise ratio is high enough and any idiot can read my comments/posts to realize I'm worth an e-mail conversation. People like Dan (fallentimes) and others are here, too.
