

The Royal We: Single Founder Startups - rgrieselhuber
http://ginzametrics.com/the-royal-we-single-founder-startups.html

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patio11
I think that the (increasing but by no means new) viability of single-founder
startups is an inevitable consequence of the environment for all startups
continuing to get radically better. If two guys could make non-trivial web
services back when making a web service started with, quite literally,
programming your own HTTP server since you didn't have a hundred thousand to
buy one, that implies very good things for a "team" which has a decade and
change of OSS to lean on.

In addition to OSS, the huge existing distribution channels like organic SEO,
AdWords, and all those things you cool people use are also a major draw.
Infrastructure has improved by orders of magnitude. APIs and snap-in services
are getting better all the time -- ten years ago, payment processing was a
multi-week endeavor, now you can do voice calls in about ten minutes of work.
Scaling is... is solved too strong a word? There has been huge diffusion of
the black magic of how to setup and architect things, both in the n-tier
server architecture sense of the word and in the "here's how you get capital
without slicing open chicken entrails" and "here's how you get users" senses
of the word.

It is a great time to be alive.

~~~
bdr
There's always been progress! It's true that one person can do a lot with all
those new tools, but two people can do more.

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abalashov
I have always found the claim that single-founder startups are imperiled at
odds with actually-existing reality; there have always been _tons_ of
successful companies started and carried to fruition by highly motivated
individuals. Individuals have been starting their own businesses since the
very dawn of entrepreneurship. I don't know where the conventional wisdom that
it's a bad idea ever came from. I see no basis for it other than in someone's
thought experiment.

~~~
brlewis
If you define a cofounder as someone who would continue the startup alone, two
provide redundancy.

On the other hand, if you're overly emphatic about the peril of going it
alone, then if one of two cofounders leaves, the remaining one won't want to
continue.

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jgershen
What about Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak?

Motivation, more workers, and new ideas are all valuable contributions, but I
feel like you might have missed the biggest benefit of all.

Co-founders can be good at the things you, personally, can't do. This is most
visible in the business/technical co-founder division, but it can generalize
to all kinds of tasks. If you're terrific at engineering large-scale
filesystems (or whatever), but you can't build a web interface (or whatever),
you might really need a technical co-founder with a different skill set. Every
day or so, my co-founder cranks out something that would have taken me a week
or more in a few hours.

Don't underestimate the value of teaming up with someone who's as good as you
are at different things!

~~~
aswanson
What about Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, or hell, Ray Kroc? No one is saying
that it is not advantageous to team up, just that you cannot discount single
founder successes.

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10ren
Didn't Bezos start with a team? I think we need to distinguish between "one-
founder" and "one-man" startups.

Speaking as a one-man startup, I think the problem is worse than skills-sets,
and worse than the costs of switching between tasks; it's also values - not in
terms of ethics, but in terms of where your attention goes. eg. attention to
detail vs. big picture; the product vs. the market; the solution vs. the
problem. One person definitely can do it all (and it's getting easier) but
it's more than twice as hard as having two people.

However, whether it's easier or harder for two people is less important than
whether it is easy _enough_ for one particular person to do it.

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MJR
_"In my case, my wife helps me get through. In many ways, although she is not
technically a co-founder, she helps with a ton of admin work and, more
importantly, has helped me stay positive. She has been as much a part of this
startup as I have, and has suffered through the same things."_

I'm curious about the line between co-founder on paper and the role a spouse
or significant other plays? A spouse in this position is clearly contributing
to the success and viability of the "single-founder" venture. If the spouse is
not there to help this would increase the workload and the founder would have
to seek out someone else for emotional support. The shared risk is there as
well as the shared hardship. If the founder can say that their spouse has been
as much a part of the start-up as they have, then how they not a co-founder?

They may not be a founder on paper, but especially in light of how assets are
split during a divorce it seems the reality shows that they do have a stake in
the business's earnings.

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rendezvouscp
“#3 (a richer source of new ideas) may be even more important than #1
(emotional support)”

As a single founder, I don’t agree with that. Once I passed a few hundred
signups, I found that people were willing to write in and tell me what they
liked and didn’t like about my service. Now, I find myself with a list of
things to get done because that’s what my customers want (not to mention what
I personally want). Like the author, I “never feel at a loss for ideas (and
have more than I know what to do with)”.

Emotional support, however, is hard because it’s not something you can take
care of on your own; until you have people validating your work as worthwhile,
it can be difficult to believe in yourself.

I think that “two (or more) heads are better than one” for _solving_ issues,
whether they be technical or with regard to how an idea should be executed.

Otherwise, nice essay (although I was hoping for a discussion on why single
founders use “we” in their text instead of “I”).

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damoncali
_I was hoping for a discussion on why single founders use “we” in their text
instead of “I”_

As was I. My own thoughts are that "I" sounds unnatural when you're talking
about a non-human entity like a corporation. Somehow, "we" does not. When I
say "I launched a product", I feel like it means that I, the person did it.
When I say "We launched a product", it means the company did it, even if it's
just me. "We" _might_ be more than me (or not me at all!) in the future but I
will always be just me.

~~~
oceanician
I think it's more 'we' is used when it's 'we' the team need to do stuff.

And when it's launched it's looked what 'I' did.

Cynical? Moi? Never ;)

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kloncks
I'd be most interested to see a response from pg regarding this post.

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baguasquirrel
I'm guessing that YC's existence as a seed fund has a lot to do with it. How
do you sell a company that is essentially a one-man shop? If I were buying a
company, I'd want to see that it's leader(s) are team players.

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DeusExMachina
As the article says, you can draw other people to the company as soon as you
can afford it. There you can demonstrate that you are a team player (and a
team leader).

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aarlo
Nice essay. I agree with pretty much all of it.

It's rare for good engineers to have an entrepreneurial/business mind -
thinking about, and being aware of, the business world outside of code
(business strategy); understanding people (sales/marketing/team leadership,
when there is a team). These kinds of engineers are amazing!! :)

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kadavy
Popular opinion may be that you need a co-founder; but once advice is doled
out, its not necessarily relevant any longer. It's getting easier and easier
to get started on your own; and you can avoid all of the friction that comes
along with sharing a company with another owner.

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danielrhodes
Even among more traditional businesses, you see more than one founder being
the norm.

For example, in a retail or fast food establishment, one person will usually
handle the operations side and the other will handle the business side.

I really don't think a startup is really a startup if you don't have anybody
working with or for you. That's also legally reflected in the difference
between a sole-proprietorship and C/S corps.

~~~
rubyrescue
i agree with your point, but you can have a one person S corp...

