I think the reason Y-combinator and others like to see two or more founders is that at least those two people are willing to work with/for each other. It is a rough filtering mechanism, and probably a very useful one, especially if your philosophy is that technical people make great business founders.
More honestly it is "Technical people can make great startup founders, but first filter on if they can recruit one other person to work with them." In any team of two, most of the time there was one person that had the idea and drive and asked the other to join them. A technical person with this type of skill, that is willing to spit the ownership of a company with someone else, is much more likely to have the skills and talents to run a high growth startup than someone who has not recruited their first person to join them.
I would imagine that when interviewing a pair of founders, whether consciously or not, people place one of them into the CEO role and the other into the CTO role. Don't most startup teams split up work like this pretty quickly?
When I was 20 I met a businessman in his mid-30s at a meetup in SF. At the time I knew a small amount of web development and was looking for work, any work, to start my career after dropping out of college. This was just as Blockchain was starting to be more then a whisper and he wanted to create something with it for the financial industry. He was obsessed with getting into YC but lamented how after talking to several "higher ups" at YC the importance of finding co-founder(s) for his application to be accepted/taken seriously. I had nothing better to do so we ended up meeting a second time at the little Starbucks at the corner of the Metreon. He offered me a CTO position with significant equity at his company to build a very complex application which would cover things like payment processing, complex permissions systems, and high data integrity requirements. I politely declined thinking he was crazy for wanting a 20 year old to do that, though I tried to push him to contract me for a landing page or whatever.
I never talked to him after that, sometimes I wonder if he made any money having been so early consumed by Blockchain. It was an immensely valuable lesson for me in the absurdity of Silicon Valley and its false signaling mechanisms.
I believe a lot of YC applications have founding teams in name only, or with bad selections, purely to appease this desire to have more then one founder. In aggregate it may work out, but in my experience...
From what I have heard, YC is pretty good at sniffing such teams out during an interview and also while reading the application. It's hard to fake good co-founding relationships.
>I think the reason Y-combinator and others like to see two or more founders is that at least those two people are willing to work with/for each other.
No, investors prefer two or more founders because it dilutes the power of any individual and makes it easier for investors to play founders against each other and water down the influence of either of them. It makes investors much more influential.
Maybe that is the biggest reason for some/many VCs, but given how Y-combinator started, the fact it was only investing in the Angel round, and many other facts of its history, I tend to doubt it. It could be true now, but when they started and formed this idea of Y-combinator, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston and the others were running it a startup themselves basically as an experiment on how to get more startups to exist. I think Y-Combinator even followed this pattern with Paul recruiting the others to start the company. VCs were not in the small Angel level investment scene and Y-combinator was only investing $7000? grand in the early days. Rent for 3 months basically (oh, how rents have exploded since then).
As in all complex behavior, there is not "one reason" for anything and I could have better stated it as: "I think 60% of the reason Y-combinator liked to see two or more founders is that at least those two people are willing to work with/for each other. Other people saw Y-Combinator's success and followed their example (including Y-Combinator)."
It would be pretty cool if people started giving percentages to causal factors when discussing complex events. It would be a concise way to get a much more useful understanding of their opinions.
The rest of the world doesn't delineate between startups and new ventures like Y Combinator. That likely accounts for most of the difference here considering they used Kickstarter data for their analysis.
==According to the researchers, ignoring other factors, solo founders are 2.6 times as likely "to own an ongoing, for-profit venture" than teams of three or more co-founders.==
It's a filtering mechanism and also 2+ founders working for a company below market wages is more valuable than 1 founder working for below market wages.
I think it is affirmative action for non-technical cofounders if you ask me.
The non-technical cofounders who become VCs want to support people who remind them of themselves in the past.
This is why founder dating is like dating at a tech school. There are many non-technical cofounders who bring nothing to the table except the desire to make a huge amount of money. That is something to work with, but it is by no means enough in a world where billions of people are hungry.
Paul Graham had a great article on Lisp. In his view, Lisp programmers love Lisp because it offers extremely powerful features in a way that other programming languages don't. Those who don't understand Lisp are (rightly) skeptical. Their thought process goes something like, "I don't need these features, and I do my work just fine". In other words, they don't know what they're missing out on, and so it appears useless to them.
I've found this pattern of human thinking to repeat itself in countless places in my life. From politics to programming and everything in between, systems look like unusable chaos when you don't understand it and have not been able to derive a controlled benefit from it. Once you learn how to use it, everything falls into place, and you immediately see how blind others are to the system as you now understand it (the curse of knowledge).
Working with people effectively is a skill, and one as rare as competent programming. And when you don't know how to do it, it looks useless or arbitrary.
The problem is there's no easy way to know which things will actually make you more productive and which won't. Will switching to lisp make me more productive or will it just mean I have to re-write 30 libraries from scratch that aren't written in lisp? Will that productivity multiply as I hire more people or will the fact that it's hard to find lisp programmers mean my options to expand will be limited? Does lisp work well on large teams or does the fact that it's typeless and every programmer makes their own DSL macros mean that it's actually harder to share knowledge?
Will switching from framework X to framework Y really increase my productivity? Is it a matter of not understanding how Y is so much more efficient to build thing than X or is it just hyperbole/marketing/cult. Switching to different product management software, different game engine, different 3d software, different wiki system, etc etc .. How can I know. If I believed everyone I'd be switching every week.
For Lisp in particular, you're probably right about many of the tradeoffs. You won't benefit from a large ecosystem, you won't find as many job candidates (albeit likely a higher quality of average candidate), and it's probably not the best language for large decentralized teams that need to coordinate development (although, what language is?).
The lack of knowing you reference is exactly what I'm riffing on here. There are people who have leveraged Lisp features to huge benefit, and there's just no easy way to explain those features to people who don't use Lisp. "There's no way to say it in that language". To outsiders then, Lisp looks like a back-patting cult with no tangible benefits and yet an air of elitism. Similarly, those with "people skills" can't always explain the mental framework and skills they've built up to make themselves excellent at working with other people, but they can easily recognize those skills in another.
This is an extraordinarily myopic view of business. Most firms do not create new tech; all firms (including tech startups) need individuals capable of selling, winning over the faith of others (recruiting), and who have an eye for creating business processes and operations for delivery, support, and so on. To watch engineers attempt to do all these things on their own is also a comedy.
This idea reminds me of things developers say to disparage anyone who operates on a higher abstraction layer than they do (e.g. Rust sucks cause it's not C. Ruby sucks cause it's for beginners. Salesforce sucks cause it's not real programming.)
Maybe 1/4 of people who want to be non-technical co-founders really bring something to the table.
It is a black comedy to see how many salesmen could not sell, how many recruiters cannot recruit, how many businesses recruit people at great expense to lose them because they use them in a boneheaded way, etc.
I've seen many people who think they are working at a high abstraction level while they are really ignoring a large number of inconvenient truths.
Given that so many businesses need web sites that are a variation on a theme I wonder why there isn't an accelerator that has a captive dev shop that is highly productive making e-commerce sites that are variations of a theme based on a fixed framework.
I'm continually amazed by the number of recruiters I work with who lack the communication skills needed to do their jobs in an environment where everybody's increasingly picky. You'd think they'd step up, considering it can mean the difference between a $30k year and a $200k one, but most of them continually choose low-effort, low-reward paths. It doesn't make that much of a difference to me whether any one recruiter can land me a role. I'll get one eventually. But it matters to the tune of $X0k to them. Boggles my mind.
I need to start coming up with filters to weed the grifters out. Spending 10+ hours on a homework assignment only to find something important wasn't communicated is getting old.
There is a common trope that developers lack social skills and business understanding and need a "people person" to "handle the business side." This is basically why almost every technical person at big companies is beholden to PMs (who may not even have any technical background) who get paid just as much, if not more, to write word documents, make powerpoints, and tell you what to do. And while it's true that a lot of developers have bad social skills, I'm willing to guess most developers who want to start a company and raise VC money don't fit that stereotype.
So maybe it's non-technical cofounders implementing a vicious cycle of grifting off the technical people, I think it's more likely it's just due to the fact that we have pervasive negative stereotypes surrounding technical people's ability to do non-technical things.
It’s not that technical founders don’t have people skills: they don’t have the time. Going full bore into product development only to be interrupted by a potential customer asking about pricing plans is a big time suck, but it’s vital if you are actually building a real business.
Wild speculation: It is the founders that have developed a deep understanding of both computers and people that are likely to be successful. These two domains are very deep and take a long time to learn well (say twenty years at a minimum). Studies suggest that generally people focus on one or the other (men generally focus on understanding things and women focus on understanding people). Find those people who did both at a young age and give them some resources to run a business and they might do very well. As Paul Graham said somewhere, these types of people are only likely to want to start a business as mundane as "make file backups really easy and reliable" if they will be very successful and that success will let them hang out and work with similar people.
Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
But when a good part of your company involves marketing, blogging, content marketing, qualifying leads, talking to potential customers, supporting customers, dealing with advertising, going to conferences (where your target customer is,) that’s a huge amount of “non-technical” work that has to get done. Many technical founders consider a non-technical founder as somehow “less important” that the tech, but it’s definitely is the opposite. All the great tech in the world doesn’t mean jack if you can’t sell it.
> Many technical founders consider a non-technical founder as somehow “less important” that the tech, but it’s definitely is the opposite. All the great tech in the world doesn’t mean jack if you can’t sell it.
And all the marketing skills in the world don't mean jack if you have nothing to sell.
A technical founder who can create a product and market it with average efficiency can still be successful, unlike a non-technical sales guru with no product.
So I'd say the technical person is till the more important one.
P.S We're also ignoring the fact that many technical founders are also great at marketing themselves. Unlike a non-technical one, who isn't technical by definition.
The only flow in the logic for me in the multi-founder scenario is that if the other person is non-technical, they are automatically considered sales etc... by default. So you can get anyone who is not technical and meet the model; regardless of their skills. It's harder to prove someone is not good at sales vs a technical person (more relevant in younger founders).
The only argument I can think of against what I just said is that the other person is not heads down building so they have more time to acquire those skills.
I’ve seen people do really well at sales within one organisation completely fail in another.
Dollar amounts between salespeople are really only comparable within a given company and maybe not even then taking into account different territories, product lines and times.
Agreed. Sales in big companies is also extremely different than sales in startups. Hard to measure how much of the sales is happening because of big company X being your employer (carrying the weight of the process).
Two people in head position are easier to sway in favor of investors' benefit than one.
Technical people as not stupid and can delegate that "recruitment" thing you pushed to front before us. I also would like to see something akin to the research we are talking about in the defense of your "much more likely to have skills to run a high growth startup".
High growth startup is of interest for investors, mainly. And that's why they prefer several cofounders, because it is easier to divide and control what can be divided. Single founder cannot be divided (except for medical conditions), two can be.
I agree that this is a thing with VC's, but the claimed logic behind it is not credible.
If you are able to recruit founders to work with each other, you didn't prove anything that couldn't be just as easily proven by recruiting a VC to invest in you.
And if it's not sales/hype that we're trying to prove, but instead a technical review by a potential co-founder, then that's what technical due diligence is for.
To me, a much better test is whether or not they've managed to get a believable proof of concept or even actual traction all by themselves, without any help and without even a co-founder.
That is a much better proof point. (leaving out of the discussion other salient points like market size, growth rate, etc)
Being able to attract another idiot who might not know anything at all about the problem domain, or gets excited about it for a few weeks or months, or "joins" five different startups in six months in the hopes that one of them gets funded.. this proves nothing of value.
Convincing a VC to fund you at reasonable terms? Much harder than finding a pliant co-founder if you have even mediocre skills at marketing/sales.
> If you are able to recruit founders to work with each other, you didn't prove anything that couldn't be just as easily proven by recruiting a VC to invest in you.
Eh, I think this is spurious. The specific post you're replying to is about a signal that seed funders can use to predict if founders have what it takes.
Seed funders can't really use the signal of "did they get VC money?"
Also, technical proof of concept is definitely a positive signal, but is not at all sufficient to make a reasonable investment bet.
> Eh, I think this is spurious. The specific post you're replying to is about a signal that seed funders can use to predict if founders have what it takes. Seed funders can't really use the signal of "did they get VC money?"
That's a fair point, but my point was really: if they can convince you as an investor to actually put in money, then they certainly have sales skills that outclass those of acquiring some random co-founder. Admittedly, maybe they don't have the technical skills, or perhaps you as an investor lacks the specific skills to evaluate those in the way that a potential co-founder might be able to, but (as I mentioned) that's what technical due diligence is for anyway.
> Also, technical proof of concept is definitely a positive signal, but is not at all sufficient to make a reasonable investment bet.
I don't see what you are saying. Are you saying that getting a co-founder is more sufficient than a technical proof of concept to make a reasonable investment bet? I wasn't arguing that one should make an entire investment based solely on one factor (the product itself).
My point is simply that: being able to sell a co-founder on the idea or product seems to be an easier lift than selling an investor to invest real money in the idea or product, irrespective of other factors.
My idea was more that one cofounder probably had an original idea, but then got another person to work with them on it. In the best case both people are working on the project in large part because they want to work with the other person. The project the two work on probably evolves enough between the two people that at the point they get to talking to an Angel, they can both claim full half credit and feel like equals in the endeavor. People who can do this are much more likely to be able to grow a business quickly like Y-Combinator tries to do.
More honestly it is "Technical people can make great startup founders, but first filter on if they can recruit one other person to work with them." In any team of two, most of the time there was one person that had the idea and drive and asked the other to join them. A technical person with this type of skill, that is willing to spit the ownership of a company with someone else, is much more likely to have the skills and talents to run a high growth startup than someone who has not recruited their first person to join them.
I would imagine that when interviewing a pair of founders, whether consciously or not, people place one of them into the CEO role and the other into the CTO role. Don't most startup teams split up work like this pretty quickly?