The multiple cofounder myth: Admobs one more data point | Hacker News Reader

The multiple cofounder myth: Admobs one more data point

7 pointscredo5 comments

I know that pg is a strong advocate of having multiple cofounders and many other people have even stronger views on this. I also see the benefits of having multiple cofounders versus having a single founder, but I don't think the impact/differences are as stark as many people make it out to be.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525 had some interesting stats on how single-founder companies have had more success than 2-founder or 3-founder companies (within a sample of 100 publicly traded comapnies)

Scobelizer's interview of the AdMobs founder (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/11/09/the-wisdom-of-admobs-founder-omar-hamoui/)is one more data point of how "one guy with a laptop" can build a hugely successful company.Incidentally Sequoia funded the 1-man company without any dogmatic rules on the number of founders (or for that matter employees)

Links for the urls mentioned above

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525

(http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/11/09/the-wisdom-of...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

IMHO the major reason single-founder startups do well is because they don't have to deal with co-founder issues.

from the data in the past HN post, single founder companies are slightly better in absolute numbers than duo founded. but i would think there could be an order of magnitude more bootstrapped single founder attempts than duo founded, and if true that would mean duo founding is way more likely to succeed than single founding.

but with that said, no matter how the data looks, these stories are very encouraging.

I am 36 years old and have founded 2 companies. One with a co-founder and the other I gave near-founder equity after 2 years. Both relationships ended poorly.

They say finding a co-founder is akin to finding a spouse. In this country > 50% of marriages fail, what does that tell you?

I believe that for those adequately capitalized they should fund themselves and then hire for skill-set gaps. If you need the financial and technical resources of 2 or more then just be careful what you wish for and take off the rose colored glasses before entering the relationship.

Lastly I would offer that a multi-person team needs a clear and elected leader (CEO), there are far too many decisions in building a company to expect that a democracy can compete.

The above is offered as testament to real-life experience. There are obviously going to be exceptions that have worked out great...and I'm happy for you!

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