I do agree that one can't wait to build the perfect team to start a project. If one knows enough experts experts in the required domains for the project, has good working rapport with them, by all means build a team with them. But if you don't know such people, then just get on with it. You will likely meet such experts at least for your next project if not for the current project
At the same time, from experience, I would have to agree with the Big P, that he is right about the chance of success being low for single founders. (Provided it is not an absolute statements and is instead a generality, there are alwasy exceptions)
Startups require lots of decisions that can make or break a company if not done right, often done very fast. And the right decisions are mostly a result of comfort or reasonable enough grasp of different domains such as finance, technology, programming, customers/marketing, to just name a few, and applying loads of common sense on that grasp.
Its very rare to have one person who has enough of a grasp on these different domains to not just be comfortable making decsions on them quickly enough and under ennormous stress, but keep making GOOD decisions critical to the sustainance and growth of the company. Yes, one can learn them fast, but then its a matter of can one person learn them fast and deep to keep making continuously quick and reasonably good decisions while still working on the development.
Thats why teams can often be more successful. Teams can access expertise on differnt domains of differnt team members(if that was the basis of builing the said team). Even if they do not have the domain expertise, the learning can be delegated to different team members and more can be covered than one person can. And there is nothing more beautiful or capable than a highly integrated and coordinated team that can move and react together to changing circumstances and keep delivering.
But thats just one side of the team coin. Along wtih bringing strengths to a team, team members also bring their weaknesses to a team. Unless the team has a way to deal with those weaknesses or have enough rapport with each other to recognise those weaknesses and find solutions to them, the weaknesses can just outweigh the strengths causing the failure of that team.
Not to mention, what about the other dynamics, ifs and buts that a team brings in? Do they really have one unified vision that they can stick to inspite of ups and downs? Can they stick together when the vision has to be modified? And so on...
I wonder, if PG and the team at YC, have any metrics/analysis on how many of the past founder teams have failed due to bad team dynamics inspite of great ideas.
(Feeling sheepish for the long post, Couldnt' help expressing myself on this topic)