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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Being single founder is of high risk venture, as anything with high risk it has potential gains as well.

I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it.

I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery.

Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company.

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OT: I read your story on your personal web page and we have some eerie similarities there. I was a solo founder for 14 years when I sold most of my company (not out of obvious necessity, I had grown tired of it somewhat and a good offer was on the table). During the last few months I had developed some tingling / pressure sensations in my fingers and legs, which I first attributed to bad posture, discs etc.

It turned out that I had a tumor growing in the spinal cavity between C2 and C4 - luckily benign, but still causing stenosis effects and eventually leading to me becoming quadriplegic unless removed. I also had severe Vitamin D and Calcium deficiency (and nothing else) and was discharged after 10 days from hospital when I had surgery. My scar is naturally very similar to yours and I have 20 Titanium screws and 6 plates implanted. My day-to-day challenges are not flexibility issues though, it's chronic pain in the hands and much worse typing skills than before surgery.

Fortunately, I found an obvious successor (the most self-motivated and responsible one, not a trained manager) in my company when I left (we had 57 employees then) and he's doing great. Good luck with your company!

The problem with Tingling sensations are that it can occur for any number of reasons, in the order of occurrence - Anxiety, Spinal issues, Issues with the nerves in the hand; unfortunately I had reasons to believe, I had all of them.

Apart from treating spinal stenosis, the tingling sensations were not treated specifically as the none of the tests isolated the reason for it. But, after spine surgery tingling sensations haven't occurred much which seems to suggest whether spinal stenosis was the reason for it.

I will link[1] the article you read just for the context of others. I haven't updated it, since then my neck movements have improved.

As you say, I'm facing severe hand numbness & pain after surgeries. Medical tests didn't help with it. I have isolated the issue to pressure on the nerves in hands while sleeping on that side. I bought wrist splint to avoid flexing my wrists while sleeping & have generally avoided sleeping on that side; it seems to have helped. This physio therapy video[1] talks about the techniques I follow. I hope it helps you too.

I'm glad that you didn't have to close your company, you took correct steps to prevent it. I helped my developers get good offers from other companies and I have closed my company.

[1]: https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...

[2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRCnRYOupCo

I have scoliosis and my one hand also sometimes falls asleep when I'm lying on my one side. Good tip on getting a wrist splint, I'll try that out, thanks.

No problem, do use tissue between the splint and the skin to ensure it doesn't bite during first few weeks (i.e. like new shoes which doesn't fit perfect).

Hope you're as well as can be expected given the circumstances.

> Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company.

I've been a solo and co-founder before.

Yes, in the early days you can't afford to hire staff. It's all on you as a solo founder and the risk (incl. burnout) is high.

But, as soon as the company is doing ok, you can and should hire an employee to shoulder some of the responsibilities a cofounder would otherwise take on.

Just because their compensation is weighted more towards cash than equity doesn't mean they can't be just as effective.

I'm getting better, thanks.

>as soon as the company is doing ok, you can and should hire an employee to shoulder some of the responsibilities a cofounder

I agree, it's hard to pull off once we get accustomed to being a single founder (survivorship bias?).

I built my company ground up from a former village in India with limited funds. I hired freshers and trained them personally to be developers. They all became good developers, but didn't become good managers (as I didn't train them for it) in-order to form a team which can shoulder responsibility.

Once I got the hang of my company with current set up, I tried to focus more on building better product than to mitigate the risk of loosing company incase something happens to me; Unfortunately it did.

Edit: pull of -> pull off

> Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company.

That sounds more like a risk of being a sole proprietor or one-person business. Lack of other executives is not the same as lack of other founders or even lack of partners.

Presumably you would not have found yourself in such a situation if you had someone you trusted who could assume day-to-day leadership in your place.

> Lack of other executives is not the same as lack of other founders or even lack of partners.

I didn't explicitly mean, every co-founder would become an executive in the company; but chances are that if I had a co-founder they might have been an executive & my situation might have been better.

>Presumably you would not have found yourself in such a situation if you had someone you trusted who could assume day-to-day leadership in your place.

I don't deny it & have discussed my reasoning in the earlier comment.

how does health affect this? is it to do with healthcare

I meant being a single executive in a company means handling all major responsibilities, so when health deteriorates we will be forced to take care of health or the company.

More over being single executive, the burnouts are much common & so is other health hazards associated with it.

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