You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
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You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
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Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#2YC 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.
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#3Previous - 166 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371146
Also Stop Looking for a Cofounder (dontscale.com) 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.... as dontscale.com seems to have overdone don't scaling.)
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#4It'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.
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#5Instead 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?
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#6It'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…
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.
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#7Instead 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, t…
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.
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#8Get a cofounder.
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#9Instead 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, t…
To put it differently:
The analysis in the article doesn't normalize for the frequency of a certain founder-number bucket. What if 99% of all start-ups have single founders? Then of course most of the companies that exit have a single founder, even if single founders perform much worse.
Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)
#10It'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…
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.
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.