
The Solo Founder Discrimination - liquimoon
http://blog.contentdj.com/2012/11/17/the-solo-founder-discrimination/
======
aclimatt
OK, no. I appreciate the support for single founders, but this isn't a
supporting argument.

> If books can be written by one person and become successful. Why can’t
> startups?

Because books and startups have nothing in common? Lots of successful
endeavors are done by a single person, but that doesn't put the efforts of a
single person vs. a team on the same footing, /especially/ as the problems
increase in difficulty. Here's a better example:

"If children can be raised by one person and become successful, why can't
startups?"

Sure. There are many children who have been raised by single parents and have
become very successful. But that doesn't mean /statistically/, this is as easy
as having both parents.[0]

The point that is being made counter to this is very simple: Yes, starting a
startup can be done by one person. As can a lot of things. But statistically
speaking, there are more successful startups that have multiple founders than
single founders. You already provided the pie charts in support of this
argument! Now to be fair, correlation does not prove causation, but the point
is generally: Starting a startup is hard. Understanding the needs of your
customers and both developing a solution to meet these need and reserving time
to convince them that you've met their needs (selling) is very, very hard.

One of Ryan Carson's arguments (#2) was in essence that having no co-founders
means you can top-down dictate leadership. I don't know about you, but I'm not
always right. I've never actually met anybody who's always right. Having a
team who's on equal footing with you allows you to vet concepts before they
catastrophically destroy your company.

To paraphrase Chris Rock: Yes, you can do it without a [co-founder], but that
doesn't mean it's to be done.

A good co-founder will almost always make your business more successful. And
that's all there is to it.

[0]
[http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/parentalcon...](http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/parentalconflict.pdf)

~~~
liquimoon
Perhaps I should rephrase this.

The odds of getting onto the NYT as an author is the probably the same as
creating the next billion dollar company. And I think the ease of technology
has gone down so much that the amount of effort it takes in writing a book is
almost the same as writing a basic web app. So, if productivity gain has
improved so dramatically, perhaps we should question our decades old
assumptions.

It's easy to bring up example like Steve Jobs and Wozniak. But creating a web
app nowadays is considerably easier than building the first PC. Even marketing
is easier now. So, why is it that we still hold the same belief about starting
companies?

~~~
aclimatt
> And I think the ease of technology has gone down so much that the amount of
> effort it takes in writing a book is almost the same as writing a basic web
> app.

That I agree with. Well, I agree as much as I can, because I haven't written a
book, but I have written a few web apps (and have started a company). Let's
say for the sake of discussion they're reasonably similar, even if perhaps
they aren't.

Yes, creating technology is a lot easier than it used to be. Marketing is
probably easier as well. But I don't believe whatsoever that building a web
app is the same as building a billion dollar business. There are a few
examples of business which got lucky, fine, but having started a startup
myself, I can say (in line with many others, pg included) that running a
company is so much different -- and so much more difficult -- than just
hacking up a web app.

Steering a company to massive success requires so many difficult decisions and
skills that often have nothing to do with your core competencies (unless
you're one of those mythical creatures who can 'do it all'), that you need the
support of at least one other person who is either A) better at it than you
are, or B) can work together with you to figure out how. Those mythical
creatures are the 11% in the pie chart, but the other 89% of us need more
manpower behind the wheel.

Whipping up a Rails app in a weekend is not the same as running a company.

~~~
liquimoon
The hardest part of starting up is at the beginning. I think once you raise
lots of money and have reached product market fit, whether you have a
cofounder is not all that important. Yet, the solo founder discrimination
starts at the beginning stage. Sure, there is data to back it up. But the
sample size is small to begin with given how reluctant they are at funding
solo founders. I think the biggest reason is probably once past YC, VC and
other investors don't fund solo founders. It's really hard to break the
conventional wisdom that all the large companies are started by a team. What I
am trying to point out is that this conventional wisdom is deeply rooted in a
time when the cost of starting up is very high. So, the real question is if
you can build a prototype, gain traction and make revenue, why is it still
frown upon that you are a solo founder.

~~~
aclimatt
> So, the real question is if you can build a prototype, gain traction and
> make revenue, why is it still frown upon that you are a solo founder.

I believe the reason is because the odds of you taking this product and
turning it into a company are less in your favor than if you had others to
consult in your business practices. It's less about "startup cost" and more
about having two or more heads in the problem space. There's a reason that
critical applications often have multiple people running the show -- it's too
easy to make a mistake and it usually requires more than one head to get
right. It's not impossible, just hard.

So from an investor's perspective, think of it this way:

You're approached by 10 companies. (Or in YC's case, hundreds.) Many of them
have a "prototype, traction, and revenue". They all look reasonably appealing.
So which do you choose? The ones with multiple very smart founders? Or the
ones with a single smart founder? Which of those will be more successful?
Which will be able to more effectively hunker down around the whiteboard and
come up with some new brilliant ideas when the times get tough?

OK, how about a harder one: You have one company with a bunch of smart
founders but only a concept, and you have another company with one founder but
a "prototype, traction, and revenue". Now which do you choose? This gets more
difficult, but I'd argue the former choice will have a better chance at
success, given equal capability of the founders. The former has validation in
the form of N people believing in their company, and the latter has real
customer validation. But the former has better /potential/ in terms of coming
up with something valuable, whereas the latter has more potential to fail at
scaling their business. This of course depends on a lot of factors though, and
maybe the latter's prowess in building a prototype, gaining traction, and
making revenue is convincing enough that they can make it through the long
haul.

Case in point though is that for a VC, it's a numbers game. And with all else
being equal, if you can invest in 4 smart people instead of 1, your odds of
return are higher.

Also, to your first point, after you're making real revenue and/or have
funding, nobody cares about how many "co-founders" you have. This is true.
They care instead about how many people are on your team. Ends up really just
being a semantic distinction based on your company stage :P.

------
mikeg8
Your examples all seem very flawed. Startups solve problems, problems that
MANY people (customers) have.

Writing a successful book is not the same sort of problem solving. Neither is
founding a religion. And developing a programming language may solve a problem
that one developer has the time and dedication to solve.

Startups with multiple cofounders have multiple views of the a problem and
will have a better chance of finding an optimal solution (wisdom of crowds) vs
a single cofounder.

~~~
liquimoon
If you are serious about solving problems, you should be talking to customers
rather than talking with your cofounders. So, is the value of having cofounder
more of an emotional support given that you can equally just hire someone?

------
001sky
It is the same reason "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", namely its a
variation of conventional wisdom (now).

Which, perhaps, is also to say its a combination of factors:

1) Herd mentality (also known as 'social proof')

2) Porfolio theory (diversification of ideas, attention to details)

3) Network effects (iff younger teams, 2x rolodexes >1x)

4) Adverse selection (co-founder is a vetted hire; early hires are hard; and
may imact outcome disproportionately).

So not entirely irrational either.The question is: is it remdiable and is such
remidiation cost-effective? Two considerations: must be so for <investors> as
well as for <founders>. But yes, a heuristic being overly generalized, is it
seems to be a variation now of cognitive bias.

------
pedalpete
I think all this solo-founder talk is missing a key thing that even Ryan
Carson acknowledges in his post. You can't do it alone forever.

I think this may be part of the investment bias. The same reasons why you will
eventually need to promote people to very high positions in the company, could
be the reasoning behind starting with people in those positions, or having
them in place by the time you go for funding and essentially making them
founders at that point.

Keep in mind, I'm a solo founder.

~~~
liquimoon
That's what I mean. I hired a designer and an intern to work on my startup. I
am not working alone. But then I don't have a cofounder. And this is being
discriminated in the investor world.

Why is that? Is it because it's harder to control from an investor's point of
view? I actually think it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Like 001sky mentioned.
The conventional wisdom is that you should have a cofounder in order to be
successful. And it's really hard to break this once it's THE conventional
wisdom.

So single founders don't get investment, so they are less successful. Then it
shows in the data...

~~~
pedalpete
I don't read the data like that. What's missing in that data is how many solo
founders there are compared to non-solo.

I think you are assuming that their are an equal number of solo-founder
companies as multi-founder companies, but I don't believe that is true. I
wouldn't be surprised at all to find that 80+% of companies that are looking
for funding are multi-founder. If that is the case, then the odds of getting
funded as a solo-founder are equal to the odds of a multi-founder company.

However, we also need to consider how we qualify those companies which are
likely to get funding or ready. Many solo-founder companies are not ready, but
by the time they are ready, will possibly have added a co-founder.

Either way, the advice I think should be just to keep doing what you're doing.
If YOU think you need a co-founder to be active in the company, you get one,
if not, you don't. Investment shouldn't come as a result of that decision,
unless investors are thinking that you can't do it without a co-founder, and
they might be right.

------
Alex3917
"If team is so important, how come the world’s biggest religions were started
by one guy."

We don't know who founded any of the biggest religions. We know almost
certainly that Jesus wasn't a real person because the story of his life
predates him by hundreds of years. We know that hinduism wasn't founded by a
single person. Buddha and Muhammed may have been real people, but there isn't
any definitive evidence. And Steve Jobs had a co-founder.

~~~
liquimoon
Steve Jobs didn't build the PC. Wozniak did. I am not trying to build a rocket
in today's age. I am launching a website. And I know how to build it myself. I
can hire a designer to help out with design. I can hire interns to work on
marketing. Why is it such a taboo that I am a solo founder in the investor's
world?

~~~
pedalpete
I think maybe you are getting downvoted because you are mis-understanding the
co-founder relationship. Steve Jobs didn't build the PC, but he knew how to
get market it and get investors involved and run a business (or at least he
was learning at the time, which gave Woz the opportunity to keep building and
coding).

The company is nothing without a product, so in that case you are correct, but
often the co-founder relationship isn't everybody building, it's sharing of
all the responsibilities necessary to run a business.

Just to note, I'm a coder, so don't think I'm some MBA guy trying to justify
my value.

------
cllns
I'm not sure the book analogy is appropriate. Books require concerted effort
until publication, then nothing (this is changing but still the case, at
large). Start-ups require constant maintenance and improvement. Care to
comment on that?

~~~
graeme
I've written a book (non-fiction), and work for a startup. The latter is
considerably more complex than the former.

It's often better to write a book by secluding yourself in a room or cabin.
You can't run a startup that way.

A book has a clear ending. A startup does not.

------
ekm2
There is a dream, a purpose slated only for you.You cant bureaucratically
design how nature will channel talent and let it flower.The single founder
plan hurts those who are very good at winning an argument by doing than by
talking.They might be hoping to show something works in order to get others on
board.Putting a rule that they must come in with someone deprives them of that
opportunity to show what they are worth.

