You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

Whether you need a co-founder or not is not about individuals, it's about the skills. To make a startup successful you need to have the required skills; if you are lucky enough to have those skills in a single person, you don't need a co-founder.

As a side-note, the exact skills you need will depend on which metric you use to become successful (e.g. whether you want to bootstrap a self-sustainable company, or if you are happy with quick growth, raising money and exiting), but generally you need skills to build the product(s), and the skills to sell them. I personally couldn't sell my way out of a paper bag, but could build pretty much anything based on software and Internet. My attempts to build a startup failed precisely because I didn't have a hustler on the team, and I gave given up on trying again unless I can either a) find one, or b) build something that sells itself.

To build a successful startup, you don't have to get a co-founder. What you need is a team.

If you are able to get things off the ground, doing 0 to 1 all by yourself, then you don't need a co-founder. But doing 1 to N, you need a team.

I had a co-founder in my first company, and we were very unproductive, as reaching consensus took a lot of time.

Then I started my second company without a cofounder. Things get way better this time. I'm an engineer and I get to build things quickly. The only downside of founding company alone is, raising money may take longer. Investors typically discriminate sole founder. But it's not impossible. There are still investors willing to take a bet on sole founders if you are able to prove that you are capable enough.

It's more possible than ever to start a company alone, especially when you know how to write code. Think about this, which is faster: a business person learns coding, or a programmer learns business skills?

Edit: adding this --

It becomes easier to start a tech company as a sole-founder nowadays, e.g., cheaper to bootstrap, commodity of tech stack / cloud infra, tons of advices on the internet, Stripe Atlas... I suspect that when this generation of sole-founders succeed, some of them will become VCs and they'll have more empathy on sole-founders and will bet on more sole-founders like them.

Instead of looking at the proportion of exited companies compared to all founder buckets, a better statistical approach would be to look at the proportion of successful exits within each bucket to see if to see if a founder bucket has a better "chance" of success.

You can kinda extrapolate the ratio of successful startups / total startups for each founder buckets by looking at the y-axis counts...but in that case, the ratio of successful startups given the startup raised $10M is 80%-90%, which doesn't make any sense. Is this data correct or am I misinterpreting it?

Previous - 166 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371146

Also Stop Looking for a Cofounder (dontscale.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060935

is interesting for the comments.

(The article is now at https://web.archive.org/web/20160225043230/http://dontscale.... as dontscale.com seems to have overdone don't scaling.)

The idea is that startups are very hard work and you need someone to bounce your ideas off, do some heavy lifting, who is also completely supportive of your success. Someone who pulls you back up when you hit the floor hard.

My theory has often been that many "solo founders" actually get some very strong support elsewhere - whether it's their spouse or a relative. A lot of the more modern VC companies target very young entrepreneurs in their 20s, who probably have not gotten married yet.

It's hard to draw a conclusion from the data unless you have a ratio. If 10x as many companies have a single founder, and 1/2 of exits are single founder exits, then the lack of multiple founders could be a negative signal.

That being said, I agree with the premise of the article and think that people should stop pushing collaboration so much (like open offices, pair programming). A lot of the time collaboration just makes you comfortable while adding lots of communication overhead.

Good cofounder > solo > bad cofounder. Pretty simple.

I always suspected that all these arbitrary investors rules were garbage. Probably what happened is that a couple of big prominent VC firms used the two-founder-only strategy and then their fund happened to succeed and they decided to attribute their success to that strategy... Whereas in fact their success was based on other factors that the VC firms did not actually understand.

Basic lesson of statistics: If you have one roll of the die statistics don't matter.

Seriously, the individual context of your situation weighs much much higher. I would only use advise in situations where I have zero ideas what to do next, and then only to start brainstorming.

Sometimes you have to do things that might even seem weird to other people. But always remember that other people are there to achieve their own goals, not yours. Even your parents might have goals that are competing with yours. E.g. they want you to be financially save because if you're not then they might need to take care of you again.

I think one of the key words in the title is "you". All the stats are fine, but it doesn't say much about what "you" need. This depends on what type of person you are, what type of skills you have and lack, how much you know about the industry you are in, what type of business you are starting, how good your network is, etc. I think the stats are nice to have, but the most important thing is being self-aware and knowing what is best for you.

Survivorship bias. What we don't see is the total proportion of failed startups.

If 95% of solo-founded startups fail outright before raising any venture capital, but only 80% of co-founded startups do, these numbers don't really mean anything -- you're better off finding a co-founder in terms of raw career success and entrepreneurial potential.

The only relevant information here is that once startups have gone through some sort of basic fundraising filter, solo-founded startups are more common than not. I would hazard a guess that there are a lot more solo-founded startups at the top of the funnel than in stage two. Let's see attrition rates at each stage (Founded, Angel, Seed, Series A, Series B, [...], Exit).

(That said: I generally agree with the statement that you don't need a co-founder. If you have the ability to execute, build and let a co-founder "find you" if necessary.)

You might not need one, but I do. I've got a cofounder now, which upped my game immediately as soon as we chose to partner up. The support, the splitting of responsibilities and just being able to relax a bit is worth a lot. I've almost doubled my revenue per head since partnering.

Isn't the #1 reason for startup failure disagreement between cofounders? Although solo-founder companies are harder to build (in the beginning), there is a power structure that makes taking decision easier, and reduces the odds of long-lasting conflicts.

I think, at its core, the reason a co-founder is suggested is a person's internal dialogue is often different than the dialogue they have with others. Probably different parts of the brain (at least in part) get used when we speak with others than when we speak to ourselves.

Anecdotal evidence: How often have you gotten stuck on a problem, but as soon as you start explaining it to someone else you immediately know the answer?

Maybe those who are successful as entrepreneurs without co-founders have learned to exercise both of these dialogues alone?

A lot of companies will start with a prototype by one person who raises a seed round and then takes on a “co-founder.” If you’re a one person operation and you’ve managed to raise money, you need to hire someone anyway, so you may as well find someone who fits the bill of cofounder.

Is the Crunchbase data accurate? It's not like it's an official SEC report.

I always figured it would be missing lots and lots of data, seeing how it's self reported, and founders are likely to be something left out due to falling out and what not..

I agree you don't need a co-founder, but in case you did, consider pitching at the startup conference open mic[1] (May 17). It's the long lost sibling of the co-founders meetup. I know for a fact that "you never know who you will meet."

[1] http://thestartupconference.com/co-founder/

YC seemed to have reported a different outcome. One factor could be that second/third time entrepreneurs may be more willing to go it alone with easier access to capital whereas younger teams may have more cofounders and without the track record, a harder time raising capital. I also wonder if that would hold here in SV.

You don't need a cofounder.

Don't ever let another person distract you from your vision.

I think the important part is to have skin in the game and you're much less likely to let down someone else than to let down yourself. If this is a cofounder or investor or someone else doesn't really matter.

I thought YC said #1 failure reason for startups was cofounder conflict?

Unknown source.

Data seems pretty flawed. Looking at exits or more than $10m raised doesn't seem like the correct marker of success.

I think "success" should be measured in exits or ongoing profitable operations, as well as revenue growth over time. Looking at that data set and seeing if number of founders had a positive or negative effect would be very interesting, but perhaps more difficult to gather.

And as long as I am wishing for the perfect data set I would also include founder happiness (maybe using spousal divorce or tenure at the company as a proxy?). Because you might have an exit but have totally destroyed your personal life, and that doesn't sound like success to me.

So... whats the point if you do not consider how many solo founders there were at the begining?

Suitable with me. But it's hard to seek seeds funds. Now I bootstrap my own company

"including some big success stories like Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky"

Right...

You need capital. Everything else is far less critical.

Sure, the majority of companies that have exited had only one founder, but >70% of founders who have exited have had cofounder(s).

Whats thr point without looking at how many solo founders went in. Perhaps there are vastly more solo founders trying.

Get a cofounder.

This screams survivorship bias so loud it hurts my ears.