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Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

Is there a bias against solo founders? I've yet to find any coworkers or friends that want to work on a project together (not enough technical skills or too busy working overtime at their jobs).

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No bias, but it generally is harder to build a successful company as a solo founder (though totally possible! Dropbox, Zenefits, Instacart all started with solo founders). If you're applying alone, tell us how you plan to overcome the solo hurdles of being alone / managing everything to do, and if you plan to bring someone in soon, let us know.

http://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/

"Can a single person apply for funding?

Yes, but the odds of being accepted are lower. A startup is too much work for one person."

I'm pretty sure you don't mean it is "too much work" for success to be a possible outcome, but that's what your copy says at the moment.

Where would be best to put this in the application form? I have explained that I am looking for co-founders and what I look for in them in the "Is there anything else we should know about your company?" section and am at the word limit. Can't seem to find a question that prompts me to to talk about how I will make do for the time being.

You could put it in your video -- that's how Parker Conrad from Zenefits did it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S83fysRwn4&feature=youtu.be

But to me this seems like a great opportunity for a solo founder to build a prototype and network with great potential cofounders.

I thought Zenefits was started by the SigFig team.

Also if you look at the TOP tech companies of the last 20 years, they were all started with a dominant founder:

  Apple - Steve Jobs
  Amazon - Jeff Bezos
  Microsoft - Bill Gates
  (Google - Larry Page)

So if you're looking for a runaway unicorn hit like that, perhaps having a very dominant founder and a founder with like 20% ain't half bad.

I think this is entirely misguided. People have selective memory: all but one of these companies had multiple founders. Hell, most companies we associate today with a single person had more than one founder. It's just that one held the most publicly visible role:

    Apple:     Steve Jobs      | + Steve Wozniak + Ronald Wayne
    Microsoft: Bill Gates      | + Paul Allen
    Google:    Larry Page      | + Sergey Brin
    Facebook:  Mark Zuckerberg | + Dustin Moskovitz + Chris Hughes + Andrew McCollum + Eduardo Saverin
    Uber[1]:   Travis Kalanick | + Garrett Camp + Ryan Graves
    Tesla[1]:  Elon Musk       | + JB Straubel + Martin Eberhard + Marc Tarpenning + Ian Wright

[1]: Travis & Elon musk weren't even founders of Uber & Tesla. They just "became" founders post factum in startup lore.

Having a dominant founder is different than being an only founder. But what's common to all these companies is that one founder was really dominant and had the vision. In fact, out of the top companies, it's safe to say that very large proportion have a dominant founder, who wound up having much more equity than the other founder.

I don't understand why there are so many downvotes on something that is, indeed, a verifiable statistical fact. Can you downvoters write a message that elaborates on why you have such a strong reaction to this data?

dominant founder is highly subjective and simply wrong in some of those cases, as pointed out above. Even if you want to argue there was a 'dominant' founder (whatever that means), your examples don't make sense:

Apple would not exist without Steve Wozniak

Google started as a partnership

Allen sold qdos to IBM which established Microsoft

I'd argue that Apple had a dominant founder in the early days, but it was Steve Wozniak, not Steve Jobs. He'd basically built the Apple I in its entirety and shown it off at Homebrew before Steve Jobs said "Let's build a company around this and sell it."

Also, Larry was always the primary driver behind Google; it started out as his thesis project, PageRank is named for him, and he'd already started crawling the web by the time Sergey joined. Sergey's initial startup idea was to order pizza via fax machine. Google obviously wouldn't exist without both of them, and Larry was smart enough to share equity and credit equally, but a startup at the YC fellowship stage is much more likely to look like Larry's thesis project than Google when it took VC.

Jobs had to persuade him to leave HP, and do all the selling and marketing, those are also important parts of building a business. In my view it was a partnership and you're ignoring a huge part of what made Apple Apple. That leaves you with Google, which also had two very early significant players.

I'm not arguing against single founders, it's perfectly possible, but most companies are not started by a single founder, they are collaborations and are all the better for it.

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