The difficulty of keeping everyone informed increases greatly when you go from 2 to three people, as you go from one communication channel to three. A small programming team can take advantage of easy communication to have better efficiency over a large team, and I imagine that the advantages are similar for all of the tasks in a startup. Because a startup is desperately trying to make itself successful before running out of money, efficiency is probably even more important and increases the chance of success disproportionate to the increase from having more people involved.
Having never started a startup, I wouldn't know, but how long does the average successful startup go without hiring more people? The number of founders pretty clearly only matters during that period. And, is that the hardest part of getting a startup off the ground? PG wrote that he generally hired people when none of the people already at the company could do the job themselves. Seems to me that if 3 people have incredibly much trouble communicating, you'd have a similar amount of trouble once there was too much work for two people and you had to hire another one.
What's different between the very earliest stages of a startup and the stage where you've hired one person?
