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Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

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Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#41

Post by ivanca »

danielvf wrote: post #37

Success rate is what matters when you are weighing co-founding or investing, not just the number of successful companies. It's as if the article discovered that fifty percent of those in American prisons are black, and came to the conclusion that there's no difference in crime and poverty beacause that's roughly half. That's meaningless. Base populations matter. What percentage of new startups are single founder?

... But then you would have to count the bias against single founders and all the investments they didn't get thanks to that bias. And also count all the accelerators than discarded them for this issue.

Plus, there is also the "fake co-founder" tactic some people use in order to avoid this bias from others; so you would have to count those as well, but that data is not public. So yeah, I think you are trying to count the uncountable.

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#43

Post by rsp1984 »

throwaway7312 wrote: post #9

I've cofounded 4 different startups. All were good ideas that bled cash or time and flopped, largely due to infighting or founder differences. One cofounder of one of the companies got really nasty about trying to leave with the rights to the company and we other two cofounders just let him have it. He sold the rights and it's now a successful venture-backed startup with soaring profits (two cofounders). Good for tha…

> The problem I find (and one I've seen in a lot of cofounder groups) is that most of the people who want to start startups are visionaries.

It's simpler than that. Most people just prefer slacking off to working their butts off.

However it's the narcissists and sociopaths that will call their slacking off being "visionary" while the good guys either just leave or start working their butts off as everybody else. Obviously you want to pick your cofounder(s) among the latter kind.

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#44

Post by jrs235 »

In Fire Someone Today: And Other Surprising Tactics for Making Your Business a Success [1] by Bob Pritchett, cofounder of Logos Research Systems, Inc., chapter 4: There Can Be Only One—Plan for Your Partner’s Departure covers the issue of cofounders. I highly enjoyed and recommend this book.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning the chapter:

When I was a teenager, I toured a factory and met its owner. Dreaming of having my own business, I asked him for the best advice he could give me. His response was two words: “No partners.” When I started the business I run today, I did not take his advice—I started it with one partner and soon added another. Starting a business is hard work, and having a partner made it a fun adventure rather than a lonely quest. We did everything together, from the paperwork to set up the business to sales calls to taking all of our meals together so we could work on the business every waking hour. We became best friends and worked well together for years. When the day came that my original partner decided to leave the business, though, we realized that our lack of planning had endangered the multiyear investment we had all made and had changed the nature of our personal relationships. There is no way I could have started the business or seen it grow the way it did without my partners. As much as I now believe that “no partners” was great advice, I know that a partnership is sometimes the only way you can launch and build a business. But if that is the case, you need to make planning the end of your partnership part of planning the start of it.

[1] http://amzn.to/2blPmmT (affiliate link)

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#45

Post by _lex »

This is pretty bad article because it focuses on # of funded startups, not # of attempted startups. What if 99.999% of startups attempted were attempted by solo founders? It would make you expect that the # of funded startups should also tilt towards solo founders - if all other odds were even, you'd expect 99.999% of funded startups to be solo founders, and it would not mean much.

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#46

Post by jcbeard »

In summary, number of co-founders doesn't necessarily matter. What does is (in no real order): the ability to raise cash, the ability to produce something that has value, and the ability of however many co-founders you have to get along.

Could have been a much shorter article since the data are so full of confounding factors as to be meaningless. It does make for a nice headline though.

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#47

Post by urlwolf »

If anything, this analysis under-represents the success of solo founders. Because VCs don't like solo founders, it's less likely they go for a VC path. There must be plenty of successes that are bootstrapped. And these solo founders may not even bother adding their company to Crunchbase.

I'm one of those.

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#48

Post by parenthephobia »

brador wrote: post #18
afoihfoina wrote: post #14

The question that most people are interested in is P(Success | Number of Founders) but what the article has answered is P(Number of Founders | Success) for a couple of different metrics of "success". They are not the same question! In particular, the average number of founders for a successful startup might be low, but the chances could still be better with more founders.

Isn't the second one just a subset of the first (post-event and excluding the failures)?

All startups are successful if you ignore the ones which fail. True, but not very interesting.

Not excluding the failures is the point of the exercise. One cannot choose to succeed, one can only choose the number of founders. The question is how many founders leads to the greatest probability of success.

Although approximately 50% of successes have one founder, it does not follow that approximately 50% of startups with one founder succeed. If 70% of startups have one founder, then those startups are under-represented amongst the winners. OTOH, if 20% of startups have two founders then, with 30% of winners having two founders, they are over-represented.

If the numbers I just made up were accurate, then it would be better to have two founders than one, even though most successful startups have one.

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#49

Post by sandebert »

bambax wrote: post #32
throwaway7312 wrote: post #9

I've cofounded 4 different startups. All were good ideas that bled cash or time and flopped, largely due to infighting or founder differences. One cofounder of one of the companies got really nasty about trying to leave with the rights to the company and we other two cofounders just let him have it. He sold the rights and it's now a successful venture-backed startup with soaring profits (two cofounders). Good for tha…

I have been self employed for 17 years as a 1-man consulting shop, and enjoy working alone. I have just started a product activity (making things and selling them to end-users) and can do the work by myself (I design, and then the actual making is done by factories) -- but for the first time I miss someone to talk to, someone with which to explore business ideas and options. Maybe a co-founder wouldn't help much beca…

It sounds like you might benefit from starting our joining a mastermind. Is that something you have considered?

(I'm not sure how universal "mastermind" is, so here's a link to help explain it a bit, and how to run one: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-167)

Re: Breaking a myth: Data shows you don’t actually need a co-founder

#50

Post by [deleted] »

brador wrote: post #18
afoihfoina wrote: post #14

The question that most people are interested in is P(Success | Number of Founders) but what the article has answered is P(Number of Founders | Success) for a couple of different metrics of "success". They are not the same question! In particular, the average number of founders for a successful startup might be low, but the chances could still be better with more founders.

Isn't the second one just a subset of the first (post-event and excluding the failures)?

[deleted]
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