Successful Solo Founders(medium.com) |
Successful Solo Founders(medium.com) |
Without knowing the distribution of startups with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5+ etc founders, it's hard to tell how much more/less likely each group is to succeed.
Who cares if 12% of solo founders make a successful exit, vs 14% of two founder companies. If you are a lone wolf and want to work alone, you are going to fail if not alone. If you are a social thinker and hate working alone, you would be silly to form a solo startup.
But it may matter for investors looking at things with the opposite perspective - for example, is it a good/bad heuristic to ignore companies with 5+ founders?
I came here to say exactly this. The entire article appears to misunderstand conditional probability.
Though I agree, they should have at least addressed the fact, and admitted that their data was suggestive at best.
And accounting for co-founder relationships and role changes is also hard, which happens often as a startup grows.
If 99.9% of all startups have 1 founder then the numbers for everything except 1 founder startups look incredible.
Personally, I've started projects alone and with others, but by far all my most successful businesses/projects (one of which I'm applying to YC with) have been initialized by myself, and then I brought in others as needed.
Unfortunately, that creates some issues. For example, my most recent partner had to step back for personal reasons. Now, the question is - does that look bad? Now, I'm in an even weaker position because it looks like I failed to convince them the project was worth it, or we had a falling out. Neither of which was the case, we're still good friends, we just had different priorities and risk / reward levels.
Now I'm again a solo founder, searching for another partner. I know I could use one, which is why I'm doing it. There's a lot of work, and I'd move faster with help. I feel that's the only time I'd search for a co-founder going forward.
I kind of doubt people can bring people in just to increase fundability. They still have to be convinced and provide value.
On the other hand, we as humans have a well known desire for one person to pin everything on. A 'hero fallacy' if you will (I'm sure there's a better term). Thousands of invested engineers didn't make the iPhone, Steve Jobs made the iPhone. Millions of troops and five countries didn't win WWII, General Patton did. A series of brilliant collaborating scientists building on the shoulders of giants didn't invent nuclear fission, Albert Einstein did. Turing cracked Enigma, nevermind the Polish cryptographers whose work he built on. Can you even name half of The Traitorous Eight?
The list of examples where we pick one name to worship from a large enterprise of many deeply involved individuals is very, very long.
So, maybe it's good to discount a perspective that identifies one single person as the complete nexus of success for any particular enterprise.
I do agree that what's more important is the ability of one core person to convince others that it's worth their time and energy to execute on the idea. The execution part is the biggest challenge - everyone wants to do a startup but whether they can survive the marathon while dealing with everything else that goes on is another story.
To me, a cofounder is someone who has enough equity to veto your decisions if they don't like them. Everyone else is an employee, whether compensated in cash, equity, or thank yous.
Most of the objections I see here are, "well, they had a support group of X and Y".
No one does it alone. The issue is whether you have ultimate authority (and therefore responsibility) for the success or failure of the company.
I'd say everyone on the list of solo founders was personally responsible for the success of their company.
That's a bit of a cop-out, since anyone can say it's a top priority on their app. Except not really: Drew was from MIT, and therefore had a large pool of potential cofounders to select from. Most people don't.
It also feels true to say that YC was more squeezed for talent back when Drew applied. Nowadays YC can afford to reject startups for not having two cofounders from the start, especially in borderline cases.
For example: Henry Ford
He had half a dozen people building his first vehicle for him, most of them contributing their time to help at no cost, while he directed the implementation/vision/ideas. This is the first version of his quadricycle vehicle [1] he built in his little shed. Ford did some early experimentation work on his own, it wasn't very long however before he invited some extremely talented specialists to join in helping him, just to basically see if they could all pull it off. Ford had a high talent for gathering skilled specialists to follow him (messianic leader, he managed to do it throughout his career), all of which were better at specific tasks than he was (whether blue print drafters, or metal workers). Solo founder? Ford Motor wouldn't exist without Ford and it wouldn't have existed without the critical day-one contributions of those particularly talented people (some of which stayed with him for many years). When Ford built the Model T, he pulled together a very small team of hyper talented people just like with the quadricycle, and they did the actual work / implementation, while he played general (to take nothing away from that role, it's at least as critical as the other roles).
Ford as a solo founder is a big stretch.
If your plan to grow your company is thru business (actually making something) then having co-founder is not required: you can hire senior people since you are solving real problem.
Aaron Patzer, on the other, was truly on his own.
In the end I would guess that the experience matters much more than the exact probability of success for most people.
It wouldn't end up even half the size if it wasn't two equally intelligent cofounders working together. That's a huge advantage of the co-founder system: you absorb your competitor instead of fighting them.
Switching from "if you don't have cofounders" to "if you have cofounders".
Done. 180 degree about face. Commence frenzy!
Stubborn, perhaps. Gregarious though? I think there would be many solo founders who are not people-persons.
Ironic for all the AI, machine learning, data-science toting startups to go in the exact opposite direction when it comes to canonizing obvious non-science.
It's not very reliable, and it may not generalize well. But it's something.
I'm curious about how successful a start-up can be, before adding anyone. [problem: founders who want to grow will do so ASAP; founders who don't, won't publicise their niche and we won't know about it]
Does Minecraft count as a "start-up"? With a billion+ dollar exit, it should be a "unicorn". I think Notch was solo for a very long time.
Of course you cannot build Amazon on your own. The difference is whether you have the type of friends who can work for free for a year while they co-found a business with you (and would be interested in doing that), or whether you are capable of filling the second-head gap with a good hire.
It's simple.