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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

There are 2 single founder startups in the current YC batch. I think there were 3 in the last one. So we do fund them. The odds of getting funded are lower for single founder startups. I once calculated about 5x worse. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything, because the single founder applicants are not simply the same kind of people as the multi-founder applicants, just in quantity one. When people apply for funding for perpetual motion machines and the like, they are disproportionately single founders.

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So once you pass the quack test, is there really a big difference between single founders and co-founder teams?

Pretty sure he said it's 5x harder for single founders who are accepted.

There are two types of single founders: those who would like to have a cofounder but can't find one (e.g. because they live in a place where good hackers are rare), and people who don't have a cofounder because they don't want one. The latter type are obviously different. The former type sometimes are too. E.g. if the reason they don't have a cofounder is that they are not persuasive enough.

Requesting an essay about the latter type.

"The odds of getting funded are lower for single founder startups"

That's actually encouraging! who does not like a challenge. And does that mean that when single founder startups do get funded is because they have better chances or just a better product/idea/execution?

I think what he's saying is that the odds look worse for single founders, but this is a little misleading because disproportionately more bad ideas come from single applicants.

The applications that get funded probably have a good background/idea, just the same as the rest.

"disproportionately more bad ideas come from single applicants" I only agree with the above statement when single founder startups do not take the initiative (and common sense) of interviewing potential users/clients for the app/product that he/she is trying to create, this will tell you at least if the idea is good or not. Thanks.

Well, if you can get a second or third founder on board, doesn't it mean the idea has been vetted out a bit by definition?

True... but only a little bit. What's important I think, is to validate your idea with people willing to give you money for it... your clients/users.

you shouldn't care about the statistics of single founder success rates.

If you have an absolutely dynamite, compelling idea and can communicate it your business will get funded.

Investors do not discriminate against you just because you are solo. If your idea is good and you are solo they might play the entrepreneur match making game and introduce you to people that can assisst you.

You are wrong.

They discriminate against you just because you are solo.

Kfool is right. We probably have higher standards for single founders, and I know a lot of later stage investors are reluctant to fund them at all.

Is the bias still relevant? CBInsights says 37% of recent Seed & Series A goes to single founders (dual founders are 40%).

Stats on slide 21: http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...

I suspect those numbers include biotech, where single founder startups are more common because they're often spinoffs of research projects with a single principal investigator.

To clarify, this first Venture Capital Human Capital report only covered Internet companies and does not include healthcare, greentech, etc which we expect to add over time along with longitudinal data.

This first report only looked at founders of internet companies who raised their first round of institutional funding between January to June 2010.

Hope that helps.

Last time I checked people were still paying money for Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Maybe some of these "quacks" should get funded.

I think there is a bit of a difference between Wolfram and your average perpetuum-mobile constructing quack.

Wolfram has an amazing amount of good work behind him and messed up (in the eyes of most, but not of all) on one thing, which I think is mostly linked to naming his book 'a new kind of science' without having the grace to wait for others to make that decision for him and by most likely being wrong about it.

If he had called it 500 interesting things to do with cellular automata there would have been no problem and his reputation would be unblemished.

It probably wouldn't have sold as many copies though.

I'm pretty sure the people who pay money for it regret it afterwards.

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