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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do [a startup without cofounders] - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules.

I think it would be very interesting to chart the success rates of sole-founder startups vs. whether or not the founder had a graduate degree: I get the feeling that the sort of struggles single founders often go through are very similar to the sort of struggles graduate students go through when they've been working for X years and still don't have a thesis in sight. If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?

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That's actually almost exactly the same thing my former boss said (he has a Ph.D).

I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it can also be misleading. A lot of these solo-Ph.D startups just chug along for years at ramen or small-business profitability levels. They work, they provide a nice living for the founder and a few employees, but they don't grow. Whether or not they survive seems to depend on how independent-minded the founders are, because the financial returns are often less than the founders can get elsewhere. Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

There're a lot of other benefits to having multiple founders besides the "don't give up" aspect. Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people, since the dumb parts of the idea get weeded out and the clever parts get amplified. Other people tend to take you more seriously when you can say "we" instead of "I". You learn how to compromise and accept other's input early, which is absolutely crucial once you have employees. You get a stronger company culture, which always seems to evolve out of the interactions between founders.

Actually, you seem a lot like my old boss - both math Ph.Ds with an independent streak, except you're half his age. He was a good guy and very, very smart (finished a Princeton Ph.D in 3 years). But the startup I worked at for 2 years, which is now 8 years old, is still limping along and hasn't taken off. And I really think that if it'd had 2-3 equal founders instead of 1 majority and 2 minority founders, it would've done much, much better.

Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

Ah, but that requires a completely different work ethic. To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people

That's what users are for. :-)

To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

But if that's your goal, then likely that will be what your startup gets. Interesting problems, few customers, and not much money.

There're lots of Ph.D-founded startups in that category. My previous employer was one. Symbolics is another high-profile example. Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

If that's what you want, go for it, as long as you're bootstrapping (it's irresponsible to take other people's money when you have no intention of making some yourself). Just be honest with yourself and any future employees about it. I'm still a bit bitter that I was sold on visions of Bloomberg and revolutionizing the financial industry while the reality was more about working on the boring parts of problems that were interesting to my boss and only vaguely interesting to customers.

Oh, my goal isn't to live on ramen. I gave that example simply to illustrate that the work ethic involved in running a startup is not quite the same as the work ethic involved in working for a big company.

Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

Partly because "we" (HN) are biased toward consumer-facing web startups, which are typically not the sort of companies started by academics, or people with extensive knowledge of a non-web industry. There are many startups out there that "we haven't heard of", but still end up solving valuable problems, and quite a few of them get rich as a result.

If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?

I doubt there's a strong correlation here. When you're working on a thesis, you're still within some academic community, have a rough deadline, and have a pretty good sense of what's going to fly or not. Moreover, the progress you make on a thesis is inherently satisfying. You can stand back and look at even a page or a paragraph of work with pride.

When you're working on a startup, you spend much of your time working on things that don't work yet or will look and feel like crap for a while. A lot of the problems you solve aren't going to be intellectually interesting, as they would be for a thesis. Which means that there are precious few rewards to be had from the pre-launch development process by itself.

I tried to go solo for a while, but found myself crushed by the lack of feedback. Then I paired up with someone (remotely), and if we weren't pair programming, we were at least showing each other what we'd done several times a week and giving feedback. Not only is this immensely helpful in terms of sustaining motivation, but merely having someone else who thinks of things you don't is incredibly valuable.

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