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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Not just that. Defining a successful startup as a startup that exited is a bit narrow of a definition. A bootstrapped startup that has sustainable growth and can remain independent is successful in my book.

Not quite. The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money. It's why people endure the pain. (It wasn't till I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.)

A bootstrapped startup that you stop paying attention to will rapidly stop making money.

> I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.

Yup! Then try hitting the wall at 600 mph, after raising $100M. That ain't pretty either.

The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money.

For some, sure. For many others it's to have the freedom to do something they enjoy, or to solve a pain they've encountered, or to help others. YC funds plenty of non-profits that aren't likely to ever make the founders "fuck you money" rich. In fact, most of the founders of those startups could earn much more elsewhere.

Or you hire a manager/staff to run it?

Once you make enough money you can sell off a bootstrapped business or at worse just run it out for cash.

I think a startup you bootstrap to generate a steady stream of revenue is just called a 'business,' or 'small business.' The all-or-nothing drive is, afaik, what makes it a 'startup.'

To put it differently:

The analysis in the article doesn't normalize for the frequency of a certain founder-number bucket. What if 99% of all start-ups have single founders? Then of course most of the companies that exit have a single founder, even if single founders perform much worse.

Yes, but the article doesn't claim that you're more likely to succeed as a solo founder. It just states that success is possible.

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