

If two people start a company are they founders or co-founders? - Skeletor

Is the word founder used only if there is one person starting a company?  If you have two or more, are you automatically labeled as co-founders?<p>I see a lot of people use co-founder when there are more than one starting team members, but the founders of our country weren't called the "Founding Co-Founders".<p>Also, if you type and/or say the word founder ten times, it starts to lose all meaning.
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olefoo
This just an artifact of english usage.

Joe and Jim start a company making widgetry for social networks.

Joe is a founder. Jim is a founder. Joe and Jim are the founders of the social
network widgetry company.

Jim is Joe's co-founder. Joe is Jim's co-founder.

The "co-" prefix should really only be used where it removes confusion and
makes it clear that there is more than one founder.

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IsaacSchlueter
_Also, if you type and/or say the word founder ten times, it starts to lose
all meaning._

Hahaha, I overhead some baked high school kids in Starbucks today have exactly
that conversation. (But I think the word was "snickerdoodle".)

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joe_adk
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamais_vu>

From a linguistic perspective, the phenomenon that a word after frequent
repetition seems to lose its meaning is connected with the very nature of
words. A word as a unit of language has three characteristics:

* It has form, i.e. it is shaped out of sounds or, in the case of written language, out of letters (characters).

* It has function, which (among other things) means that it operates in a meaningful sentence.

* It has meaning, which implies that it refers to a certain unit of thought (a concept or an idea) within a context.

However, when a word is repeated over and over again, it is in fact only the
form which is repeated. There is no sentence, so the function of the word is
eliminated. Its meaning, too, is effectively eliminated, because there is no
context. A few repetitions will leave the language user's memory and
expectation intact: he remembers the meaning and expects a meaningful
reference. Continued repetition, however, will more and more foreground the
word form to the exclusion of function and meaning, until the word literally
"makes no sense". It is not the word that is being repeated, but only one of
its aspects: the word form.

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mythogen
If I type and/or say the word founder ten times, it starts to mean "to fail or
utterly collapse".

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jwilliams
I don't think it matters.

What I do find odd is where startups use the CxO titles... Can you really be
CEO of a two person startup? Seems a bit ludicrous.

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poppysan
You can be a founder and also a position such as CTO and CEO, based on what
you are contributing work-wise.

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jwilliams
Shrug - Yeah, I know - I'm probably just being a grump, but it seems
ostentatious to me.

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emmett
It's critical for dealing with business people outside the startup world. It's
hard to get them to take you seriously unless you're the CxO of something.
That's why we use the titles at jtv anyway.

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jwilliams
Ok - Probably just my experience - might just be a nomenclature difference
between the US and UK/Aus/etc.

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Encosia
Titles are meaningless. Especially the difference between minor variations of
the same effective title.

In the end, both of those are the same thing.

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vaksel
doesn't really matter, but I'd say that the co-founder label is more
appropriate since it tells the person that you didn't do the whole thing all
by yourself.

your other thing doesn't really make sense, they were called the founding
fathers...which by itself means that there was more than 1.

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defunkt
At GitHub we call ourselves co-founders.

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petergroverman
What is the Plural of 'Prius'? Pri-i? Prium? Priuseses?

