Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

I personally have no trouble working with others, nor difficulty enrolling others in my vision. I am extremely emotionally stable—I don't take things personally and have little trouble riding the ups and downs. I acknowledge that there are benefits to a cofounder that I'm missing out on (as well as drawbacks I'm avoiding!), but simply put, it's disappointing to see many investors marching lock-step to the beat of someone else's drum.

Definition of an echo chamber. In case a Forbes reporter wants to quote me, this comment is not for attribution.

  - you get to deal with the stress on your own (or maybe you have a 
    supportive spouse)

  - you can't have soundboard sessions with your co-founders

  - you can't divide the labor 

  - you have to have a lot of expertise in a variety of fields

  - if you get ill early on it will likely kill the company

  - nobody will call you out when you're spouting nonsense

  - likely a long long list of stuff following these

  - you don't have to deal with your co-founders

That's why even if having co-founders is good plenty of people chose to go it alone, and end up hiring what would have been co-founders as early employees once they've established a certain level of success.

If having no co-founders was a guaranteed fail nobody would do it, but plenty of people get by just fine to prove that it is not a hard and fast law, but more of a statistical issue.

I suppose if Drew retained control he could prevent it destroying the company, but then he doesn't really have an equal co-founder to keep him in check.

Seems like a really tough problem. Kind of amazing it worked out so well.

Being a single founder is hard, you have to deal with everything from incorporating, accounting, writing code, design, worry about SEO, how to introduce your project to the world get some momentum, etc..

Plus, add that to the fact that I'm from Europe, VC is very complicated here.

But because it's hard we should be more appreciated and not put aside.

I'm working on it for at least 3 months now and it's 90% complete, I've been able to keep motivated and I've learned lot along the way.

I just felt that this was the right path to go for me, I didn't feel the need have someone as a parter on this. I may be wrong in a long run but for now I'm pretty satisfied with what I've done.

Obviously I don't agree with YC rule here, I understand some of their view points , but not everything is true or false. Some great projects maybe aren't being looked into because of the single-founder rule.

But then again, you don't have to apply to YC or any funding, try something else, or simple bootstrap you idea and see how it goes.

That's still Heroku in my book

And maybe we should define success as financial/market success, not emotional fulfilment or getting your first two round of funding.

Again, just a fast look at VC finances shows that VC just MUST hit 'home runs' such as Dropbox or better.

Then just a fast look at the history of home runs shows that get only a few each decade. And just a fast look at those home runs shows that a significant pattern is super-tough to see. And, any such pattern has only a few examples because the larger 'circumstances' change so much from one decade to another. E.g., it used to be that a trillion bytes was a REALLY large chunk of hard disk space, but now it's not so large just as main memory.

So, since have to be looking for such home runs under such circumstances, what good 'rules' can be formulated? Remember, we're looking for home runs and not trying to find a description of a VCs average arriving e-mail pitch. Or we're looking for some tiny number of golden needles in in a huge pile of hay so that statements about some average about the hay are just irrelevant.

Well, one could guess, 'the first rule of VC is that there are no rules', but, actually, that is too strong.

But not good is the rule against 'single founders'. Why? With the larger circumstances today, a single founder has some big advantages. I will let readers fill in some of the advantages based on current circumstances just as an exercise!

Next, for 'the rules', there still are some that can apply to some of the startup candidates, One collection of such candidates is based on startups where the core 'secret sauce' is especially powerful and can be evaluated just technically. For a biomedical analogy, consider a safe, effective, cheap single pill cure for any cancer: Then just evaluate the pill and f'get about the founder because if do have the pill and if he did invent it, then f'get everything else about him! He invented the pill, for god's sake! Or, we know you are plenty smart, but could you have invented that pill? So, if he's smarter than you, then you've just gotta think that he's plenty smart. I mean, given that he invented that pill, what are the chances he's a doofus? Or, to be quite specific, even worst case, just what issues of 'business acumen' couldn't be solved by hiring him a COO, CFO, SVP Operations, SVP HR? And there's no good reason to suspect such a worst case or even a bad case. Or, did I mention, the guy invented the pill?

For meaningful rules to apply to all IT startup candidates, that seems to be asking too much.

The simple answer that will fit on the back of the usual 3 x 5" card of VC rules that even a VC can understand is, in looking for the crucial home runs, the first rule is there are no rules.