
You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016) - startupflix
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/co-founders-optional/
======
BerislavLopac
Whether you need a co-founder or not is not about individuals, it's about the
skills. To make a startup successful you need to have the required skills; if
you are lucky enough to have those skills in a single person, you don't need a
co-founder.

As a side-note, the exact skills you need will depend on which metric you use
to become successful (e.g. whether you want to bootstrap a self-sustainable
company, or if you are happy with quick growth, raising money and exiting),
but generally you need skills to build the product(s), and the skills to sell
them. I personally couldn't sell my way out of a paper bag, but could build
pretty much anything based on software and Internet. My attempts to build a
startup failed precisely because I didn't have a hustler on the team, and I
gave given up on trying again unless I can either a) find one, or b) build
something that sells itself.

~~~
danieltillett
If you are bright(ish) you can figure almost all of the needed skills with a
bit of reading and practice. I taught myself everything I needed to make a
success of my business from software development, devops, accounting, tax,
marketing, sales, etc. Sure I made more than a few mistakes, but I didn’t run
across anything insurmountable.

Sales is an interesting skill. People will buy from pretty bad sales people if
the sales person is a) knowledgeable and b) genuine. As a founder you should
be both so as long as you get out and meet potential clients (or pick up the
phone) you will sell as well as any skilled sales person. The skill that good
professional sales people have is selling when they don’t know or care about
the product.

Don’t ever think you can't be an effective sales person for the company you
founded and built. Every founder can sell as long as they try.

~~~
maxsilver
Do you have any tips or starting point suggestions for someone who is
technical, but otherwise ignorant to marketing/sales?

How would someone learn sales?

~~~
danieltillett
Worry about sales before marketing. It is very easy to snow yourself that
marketing is helping when a lot of the time it is just ego building - "look Ma
we are on Cruchbase".

Sales is really a numbers games. Almost everybody you talk to says no (and
often very rudely), but if your product has any value (and sometimes even when
it doesn't) someone will say yes. Set a target per day of approaches and don't
stop until you reach it.

On the actual sales pitch try to not to overwhelm the potential customers with
information (I still do this). You should aim to be listening 60% of the time
and talking 40% of the time. Record your pitches so you can review where you
went wrong and time how much you are talking.

If you are the founder and built the product you should be able to wing the
pitch (it will be more genuine if you do), but roleplay out your pitches with
someone you feel comfortable with. What can really work well here is to write
a whole lot of scenarios for the other person and have them pull one out at
random and use for you to practice against. Each time you come across a new
objection or blocking point then added it to the roleplay list.

The most important thing is to just grind through it. Sales is hard and
unpleasant (nobody likes being rejected), but the more you do the better you
will get at it. Set aside a time every day to do it and just do it.

------
wenbin
To build a successful startup, you don't have to get a co-founder. What you
need is a team.

If you are able to get things off the ground, doing 0 to 1 all by yourself,
then you don't need a co-founder. But doing 1 to N, you need a team.

I had a co-founder in my first company, and we were very unproductive, as
reaching consensus took a lot of time.

Then I started my second company without a cofounder. Things get way better
this time. I'm an engineer and I get to build things quickly. The only
downside of founding company alone is, raising money may take longer.
Investors typically discriminate sole founder. But it's not impossible. There
are still investors willing to take a bet on sole founders if you are able to
prove that you are capable enough.

It's more possible than ever to start a company alone, especially when you
know how to write code. Think about this, which is faster: a business person
learns coding, or a programmer learns business skills?

Edit: adding this --

It becomes easier to start a tech company as a sole-founder nowadays, e.g.,
cheaper to bootstrap, commodity of tech stack / cloud infra, tons of advices
on the internet, Stripe Atlas... I suspect that when this generation of sole-
founders succeed, some of them will become VCs and they'll have more empathy
on sole-founders and will bet on more sole-founders like them.

~~~
loceng
A programmer who learns business skills - who already has money is the next
level up to start from, though designers for awhile seemed to be getting their
due share of attention/importance validated in the trifecta of design-
business-engineering skills.

------
minimaxir
Instead of looking at the proportion of exited companies _compared to all
founder buckets_ , a better statistical approach would be to look at the
proportion of successful exits _within each bucket_ to see if to see if a
founder bucket has a better "chance" of success.

You can kinda extrapolate the ratio of successful startups / total startups
for each founder buckets by looking at the y-axis counts...but in that case,
the ratio of successful startups given the startup raised $10M is 80%-90%,
which doesn't make any sense. Is this data correct or am I misinterpreting it?

~~~
pul
Not just that. Defining a successful startup as a startup that exited is a bit
narrow of a definition. A bootstrapped startup that has sustainable growth and
can remain independent is successful in my book.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Not quite. The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about
money. It's why people endure the pain. (It wasn't till I tried starting one
that I realized just how painful it is.)

A bootstrapped startup that you stop paying attention to will rapidly stop
making money.

~~~
onion2k
_The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money._

For some, sure. For many others it's to have the freedom to do something they
enjoy, or to solve a pain they've encountered, or to help others. YC funds
plenty of non-profits that aren't likely to ever make the founders "fuck you
money" rich. In fact, most of the founders of those startups could earn much
more elsewhere.

------
tim333
Previous - 166 comments
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371146)

Also Stop Looking for a Cofounder (dontscale.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060935)

is interesting for the comments.

(The article is now at
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160225043230/http://dontscale....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160225043230/http://dontscale.com/stop-
looking-for-a-cofounder/) as dontscale.com seems to have overdone don't
scaling.)

------
muzani
The idea is that startups are very hard work and you need someone to bounce
your ideas off, do some heavy lifting, who is also completely supportive of
your success. Someone who pulls you back up when you hit the floor hard.

My theory has often been that many "solo founders" actually get some very
strong support elsewhere - whether it's their spouse or a relative. A lot of
the more modern VC companies target very young entrepreneurs in their 20s, who
probably have not gotten married yet.

~~~
iovrthoughtthis
They absolutely do get strong support elsewhere.

I would argue even teams of co-founders require a diverse support network!
Relying on only your team is putting all of your eggs in one basket and
superficially restricting the diversity of views you need to be innovative.

~~~
muzani
Most of the time there are some very serious issues that only the management
team can understand or discuss. For example a risky stealth pivot, or having
to fire the CTO who has been there since the start. Or a major glitch that may
lose all their customers if anyone found out.

------
cncrnd
It's hard to draw a conclusion from the data unless you have a ratio. If 10x
as many companies have a single founder, and 1/2 of exits are single founder
exits, then the lack of multiple founders could be a negative signal.

That being said, I agree with the premise of the article and think that people
should stop pushing collaboration so much (like open offices, pair
programming). A lot of the time collaboration just makes you comfortable while
adding lots of communication overhead.

~~~
graycat
IIRC "Adding programmers to a late software project makes it later" due to the
increased communications overhead. Famous remark in computing,

Frederick P. Brooks, _The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering_
, ISBN 0-201-00650-2.

~~~
MikeTheGreat
That's true, but that's also talking about something else.

Brooks was saying that if the project is late you can't speed it up by adding
more people to it because the current team members then need to spend less
time working on production and instead spend that time getting the new people
up to speed.

In contrast, if you're digging a ditch and that project is late then you can
definitely speed it up by adding more people. They can work in parallel and
the new workers already have the skills needed to contribute immediately.

The GP was talking about ongoing communication overhead for people that are
already on the team.

~~~
graycat
It's been a while since read the book. IIRC, you are correct.

Your extra details are good, but we still can take a simpler approach: More
people means more communications, of all kinds! So, the whole thing can go
bureaucratic with endless lists of _requirements_ , considerations, ....

E.g., my solo, sole founder project code has 24,000 programming language
statements in 100,000 lines of typing, and large organizations, even using the
parallelism you mentioned, might have taken more person-hours and maybe more
elapsed time to do that than I did!

I had one of those situations: About a dozen of us. In the afternoon I heard
the horror stories about the weeks of work they had to do to program the _rule
subroutines_. Gads, their implementation would have made a mess out of the
feature.

Some of the problem was a _run time_ routine for some RETE logic. The
programmers were planning to return from all the subroutines, run the RETE
code, then somehow call all the subroutines again -- at best, a disaster. By
dawn I had sent e-mail with a clean solution: Carry along an entry variable
pointer to the RETE routine, keep it active on the stack of dynamic
descendancy, and then invoke it where as needed. I got some sleep and when I
got back the production code was nearly done!

How that happen? We had some bright guys, but one guy working alone overnight
did better than the results of all the meetings and plannings.

------
rajacombinator
Good cofounder > solo > bad cofounder. Pretty simple.

~~~
danieltillett
If only you didn’t have to worry about good cofounders turning into bad
cofounders.

~~~
brianwawok
If a cofounder appears good but ends up bad, it means you misjudged him from
the start ;)

Which is obviously hard, see entire industry around hiring games...

~~~
danieltillett
It is more complexity than this as the difference between a good cofounder and
a bad one is many times is situational. On one path to growth your cofounder
is good and on an alternative path they are bad.

------
grosjona
I always suspected that all these arbitrary investors rules were garbage.
Probably what happened is that a couple of big prominent VC firms used the
two-founder-only strategy and then their fund happened to succeed and they
decided to attribute their success to that strategy... Whereas in fact their
success was based on other factors that the VC firms did not actually
understand.

~~~
super-serial
That could be the case but my theory is that it's about control. Investors
funded a solo founder before and then when they said to take some action
(sell/pivot/scale up) the solo founder didn't do it.

They said damn this guy owns 70% of the company after Series A, we can't make
him do anything we want! Now if there were 2 founders each founder would only
own 35% of the company, and if they could convince one of those two founders
they could get what they want. All investors want cofounders because they want
more leverage. So if some investor is urging you to team up with a cofounder
to 'complement your skillset' it might actually be that they aren't confident
in your leadership and want an option to override you.

------
erikb
Basic lesson of statistics: If you have one roll of the die statistics don't
matter.

Seriously, the individual context of your situation weighs much much higher. I
would only use advise in situations where I have zero ideas what to do next,
and then only to start brainstorming.

Sometimes you have to do things that might even seem weird to other people.
But always remember that other people are there to achieve their own goals,
not yours. Even your parents might have goals that are competing with yours.
E.g. they want you to be financially save because if you're not then they
might need to take care of you again.

~~~
raverbashing
More importantly, the common repeated fact that "x% of startups fail" means
little.

It's not a die roll. It's more like hundreds of separate die rolls with their
own different probabilities and outcomes. It's how good the team is, he good
you are at several different competencies (including toilet cleaning) and if
your idea of an Uber for hair extensions is the hottest new thing or just dead
in the water.

This, in the end, approximates a continuous distribution.

------
harro33
I think one of the key words in the title is "you". All the stats are fine,
but it doesn't say much about what "you" need. This depends on what type of
person you are, what type of skills you have and lack, how much you know about
the industry you are in, what type of business you are starting, how good your
network is, etc. I think the stats are nice to have, but the most important
thing is being self-aware and knowing what is best for you.

------
keithwhor
Survivorship bias. What we don't see is the total proportion of failed
startups.

If 95% of solo-founded startups fail outright before raising any venture
capital, but only 80% of co-founded startups do, these numbers don't really
mean anything -- you're better off finding a co-founder in terms of raw career
success and entrepreneurial potential.

The only relevant information here is that once startups have gone through
some sort of basic fundraising filter, solo-founded startups are more common
than not. I would hazard a guess that there are a lot more solo-founded
startups at the top of the funnel than in stage two. Let's see attrition rates
at each stage (Founded, Angel, Seed, Series A, Series B, [...], Exit).

(That said: I generally agree with the statement that you don't need a co-
founder. If you have the ability to execute, build and let a co-founder "find
you" if necessary.)

~~~
brianwawok
It doesn't matter. You shouldn't pick FOR YOU what works ON AVERAGE.

Say on AVERAGE 50% of 2-man startups win, but only 10% of 1-man startups win.
And you are anti-social. YOUR personal win rate may well be higher as a 1-man
startup, averages be damned.

Averages are cool to think about a problem. But know yourself. Your correct
choice may not be the average best choice.

(That said I started solo and roped in my wife when I needed some gaps filled,
but that was a good path for my style. I do not suggest it as a general path
others should take).

------
antonkm
You might not need one, but I do. I've got a cofounder now, which upped my
game immediately as soon as we chose to partner up. The support, the splitting
of responsibilities and just being able to relax a bit is worth a lot. I've
almost doubled my revenue per head since partnering.

------
shin_lao
Isn't the #1 reason for startup failure disagreement between cofounders?
Although solo-founder companies are harder to build (in the beginning), there
is a power structure that makes taking decision easier, and reduces the odds
of long-lasting conflicts.

------
perpetualcrayon
I think, at its core, the reason a co-founder is suggested is a person's
internal dialogue is often different than the dialogue they have with others.
Probably different parts of the brain (at least in part) get used when we
speak with others than when we speak to ourselves.

Anecdotal evidence: How often have you gotten stuck on a problem, but as soon
as you start explaining it to someone else you immediately know the answer?

Maybe those who are successful as entrepreneurs without co-founders have
learned to exercise both of these dialogues alone?

~~~
cardine
Just because you don't have a co-founder doesn't mean you can't talk with
other people about your startup.

I am a solo founder and I spent a lot of time talking to friends in my
industry and early employees.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
Point taken, but I think you missed my point.

------
chatmasta
A lot of companies will start with a prototype by one person who raises a seed
round and then takes on a “co-founder.” If you’re a one person operation and
you’ve managed to raise money, you need to hire someone anyway, so you may as
well find someone who fits the bill of cofounder.

~~~
super-serial
Might as well give them 50% stake in a company you built and might as well
dilute your ownership? That makes no sense if you can hire someone to do the
job, pay them X% more, and keep 100% ownership of your startup.

I think the reason YC and other incubators want cofounders is because it
hedges their risk. If one founder gets sick or goes against YC's advice they
can apply pressure through the other founder, and in extreme cases team up
with other investors to oust the bad founder. If it's a solo founder they own
too much of the company to divide and conquer so they can't make any power
plays. I'm not saying that these moves are always bad - in general investors
want the company to succeed. They just rather have an option than to put all
their eggs in one basket with a solo founder.

~~~
chatmasta
It's not about giving 50% of your company, and in a case like that the co-
founder would definitely not get 50% (or deserve it from a risk/reward
perspective). It's about having a partner and teammate who helps you
accomplish more than you could alone.

------
mozumder
Is the Crunchbase data accurate? It's not like it's an official SEC report.

I always figured it would be missing lots and lots of data, seeing how it's
self reported, and founders are likely to be something left out due to falling
out and what not..

------
alain94040
I agree you don't _need_ a co-founder, but in case you did, consider pitching
at the startup conference open mic[1] (May 17). It's the long lost sibling of
the co-founders meetup. I know for a fact that "you never know who you will
meet."

[1] [http://thestartupconference.com/co-
founder/](http://thestartupconference.com/co-founder/)

------
rdlecler1
YC seemed to have reported a different outcome. One factor could be that
second/third time entrepreneurs may be more willing to go it alone with easier
access to capital whereas younger teams may have more cofounders and without
the track record, a harder time raising capital. I also wonder if that would
hold here in SV.

------
justinzollars
You don't need a cofounder.

Don't ever let another person distract you from your vision.

------
adius
I think the important part is to have skin in the game and you're much less
likely to let down someone else than to let down yourself. If this is a
cofounder or investor or someone else doesn't really matter.

------
trexen
I thought YC said #1 failure reason for startups was cofounder conflict?

Unknown source.

~~~
qsdevacc
And that on face value supports the OP article.

------
mooreds
Data seems pretty flawed. Looking at exits or more than $10m raised doesn't
seem like the correct marker of success.

I think "success" should be measured in exits or ongoing profitable
operations, as well as revenue growth over time. Looking at that data set and
seeing if number of founders had a positive or negative effect would be very
interesting, but perhaps more difficult to gather.

And as long as I am wishing for the perfect data set I would also include
founder happiness (maybe using spousal divorce or tenure at the company as a
proxy?). Because you might have an exit but have totally destroyed your
personal life, and that doesn't sound like success to me.

------
Mortiffer
So... whats the point if you do not consider how many solo founders there were
at the begining?

------
niqmk
Suitable with me. But it's hard to seek seeds funds. Now I bootstrap my own
company

------
bigiain
"including some big success stories like Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky"

Right...

------
justherefortart
You need capital. Everything else is far less critical.

~~~
stingraycharles
Actually if you have a solid amount of spare time, capital might not what you
need. Capital is a means to create time, though.

~~~
CamTin
Labor is also a means of turning time into capital. For example, I use my free
evenings and weekends from my dayjob to hustle things on the side with the
goal of earning capital in order not to need a day job.

------
FriedPickles
Sure, the majority of _companies_ that have exited had only one founder, but
>70% of _founders_ who have exited have had cofounder(s).

~~~
hayksaakian
isn't that intrinsic to companies with multiple founders?

For example:

you have a pool of 10 companies

6 of them exit

3 of the companies who exited had 2 founders each

3 of the companies who exited had one founder

in this world:

66% of founders who have exited, have had cofounders

now:

if you are a person who is founding a company, does bringing on a cofounder
increase your chance of exiting in this world?

------
Mortiffer
Whats thr point without looking at how many solo founders went in. Perhaps
there are vastly more solo founders trying.

------
judgardner
Get a cofounder.

------
hyperfekt
This screams survivorship bias so loud it hurts my ears.

