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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we still have a higher bar for single founders, because it will be harder for them.

Is there any data to suggest that single founders who overcome the increased difficulty also have greater success than their peers? Or is it like running with rocks in your shoes — unnecessarily painful?

It's like being a paper tape Turing machine. Technically, you can do anything in the world. In reality, you're limited by how efficiently you, as an individual, can run back and forth writing zeros and ones.

Being a single founder isn't like building up a muscle that'll make you bigger, faster, stronger—there are world-level parallelism problems you can't accomplish alone (work and fundraise, work and promote, sleep and work).

Perhaps a better title is "single bootstrap'r." All you really need is to build something other people find interesting to get attention to attract validation to pull in other people who share your vision (who, since they are starting right after you, become defacto founders).

The single founder problem is more "Will you accept someone who is capable but hasn't found any smart friends yet?" and less "I can build a $50 million company all by myself. Just give me $100k. Please?"

>> The single founder problem is more "Will you accept someone who is capable but hasn't found any smart friends yet?" and less "I can build a $50 million company all by myself. Just give me $100k. Please?"

Exactly!!

Empirically, the latter.

Why are we acting as single founders are single forever?It's like, once you enter YC as a single founder you cannot hire anyone else to aid you in your startup, being forever alone.

We both know quality developers would LOVE working for a YC startup and it should be no problem hiring someone as a co-founder IF you know how to pick. Now, of course, that co-founder was not born in the same hospital as you and you might not have that super SyFy connection as super old time buddies but will that lead to a startup failure?No,I don't think so.

In fact I am willing to bet that even a non-technical single founder (ye, we don't like them) with no experience what-so-ever, can handle YC application process. How? Raw/natural talent, cleverness, cunningness etc. Qualities hard to measure and observe, no doubt, but most valuable. If you can get a founder like that, there should be no problems in the future. Going "by the paper" is not always the best choice.

EDIT: And in all honesty the YC Application form is cleverly made to target a specific group of people, eliminating a huge amount of talent and in some points minimizing innovation.

You can certainly bring on more people, but if you didn't know them before you started the company, your relationship is probably not going to be able to withstand the stresses that a startup will apply to it.

If we had really designed the YC application form to eliminate a huge amount of talent, that wouldn't be clever, would it? We'd lose a proportionately huge amount of money.

I would have guessed the exact opposite, that early-stage investors behave like binary classifiers who've been tuned to make a huge tradeoff of lower recall, in exchange for higher precision.

Well, he did say "talent", not "people"

I agree with the risk associated with people you barely know but IF you are smart enough you'll pick someone who is less likely to fail in your team.That is of course another very rare set of skills, to know what to pick and how, but we are assuming that the single founder has that ability. Perhaps I am too confident on this one because I almost never fail in hiring (no arrogance intended) but with the homework done and that "thing", the chances are much higher to withstand that kind of pressure.Now that I think about it, it's probably a cultural thing. Your criterias match the US market more which is understandable and indeed those relationships are hard to maintain but "internationally speaking" you can find what you're looking for, easier.

Perhaps my second statement was misunderstood. No way you guys created the YC application form to eliminate talent. That wouldn't make sense. The intentions were positive but formed some kind of barriers for some applicants. It's like going hunting with a good weapon to catch a good prey (and you do catch some)when there are better weapons at your disposable. So I'm not saying YC is not successful because it would be stupid to say it. What I am saying is, you can significantly improve the success/failure ratio by taking into consideration other indicators as well. You are losing money anyway but you don't know it. Who knows what startups you missed/are missing until now that could've brought you more money than those that already did.Why swim in a small pool when you have a bigger one at your disposal. Also the YC app form reflects jury's mind.

Hiring an employee and finding a co-founder are distinctly different on multiple levels.

I agree but we are talking about cofounders.Maybe I missed a new message from yesterday.

I agree on that. When something is already started it gets harder to sync to that same sort of idea.

What is the percentage of founder breakups these days? We talking 20% - 30%? What's worse... a bad co-founding relationship with moderate traction or a technical solo founder who is about seeing early signs of hockey stick growth?

I understand that empirically it seems that having a co-founder decreases your chances of failure. Others have already done a great job at explaining why.

I'd be interested however in understanding how, empirically, single founders with a couple talented contractors/employees compare to the potentially more risky duo founder relationship. Or is this simply not the kind of team YC would get behind?

Employees can't usually offer the moral support a cofounder can. Unless they become de facto cofounders, but that's pretty rare.

Yes, that is the underestimated main point. I'm still living in one of the rare tech hostile desert though. Trying to get through that single no tech founder karma, because I'm starting up precisely to sell an app for 'relationship skills' or 'efficient non-violent communication', so clear abilities, values, and training in this would prevail over 'rock-star programming talent'. Looking for ladies in tech too... Door wide open for them to become cofounders, but I can understand risk-adverse people, after all I am in need of a complementary skill set ;) Do you give me a chance?

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