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This Founder Says To Think Long Term When Selecting Your Cofounder
Voice-enabled smart speakers continue to revolutionize the way we obtain products and services. These smart speaker capabilities make ordering new clothes from Amazon or adjusting the volume of your music effortless, but these programs are not easy to build. Vasili Shynkarenka and Maksim Abramchuk started Storyline, the startup that allows you to create these capabilities for Amazon’s voice service, Alexa, without having to write code. Alexa Skills, which are the capabilities that will enable Amazon’s smart speakers to execute your commands, is what Storyline assists you in creating. The startup powers 2,700 Alexa skills, which is roughly 7% of the whole Skill marketplace. The two cofounders have recently closed a seed round from Y Combinator (YC), Adam Draper (the first investor in Coinbase and Amplitude), and MSQRD co-founders Eugene Nevgen and Sergey Gonchar (sold to Facebook two years ago).
Frederick Daso: How did you go about picking your cofounder?
Vasili Shynkarenka: The way I think about picking a cofounder is almost like picking your wife. It’s critical not to mess this up, because if you choose the wrong cofounder, it may be worse than having no cofounder. Things will get worse over time. I have had that experience before. We did three startups before starting Storyline. We started a company…
