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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)

#21

Post by mooreds »

Data seems pretty flawed. Looking at exits or more than $10m raised doesn't seem like the correct marker of success.

I think "success" should be measured in exits or ongoing profitable operations, as well as revenue growth over time. Looking at that data set and seeing if number of founders had a positive or negative effect would be very interesting, but perhaps more difficult to gather.

And as long as I am wishing for the perfect data set I would also include founder happiness (maybe using spousal divorce or tenure at the company as a proxy?). Because you might have an exit but have totally destroyed your personal life, and that doesn't sound like success to me.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#22

Post by antonkm »

You might not need one, but I do. I've got a cofounder now, which upped my game immediately as soon as we chose to partner up. The support, the splitting of responsibilities and just being able to relax a bit is worth a lot. I've almost doubled my revenue per head since partnering.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#23

Post by sillysaurus3 »

pul wrote: post #7
minimaxir wrote: post #5

Instead 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.

Not quite. The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money. It's why people endure the pain. (It wasn't till I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.)

A bootstrapped startup that you stop paying attention to will rapidly stop making money.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#25

Post by raverbashing »

erikb wrote: post #20

Basic lesson of statistics: If you have one roll of the die statistics don't matter. Seriously, the individual context of your situation weighs much much higher. I would only use advise in situations where I have zero ideas what to do next, and then only to start brainstorming. Sometimes you have to do things that might even seem weird to other people. But always remember that other people are there to achieve their…

More importantly, the common repeated fact that "x% of startups fail" means little.

It's not a die roll. It's more like hundreds of separate die rolls with their own different probabilities and outcomes. It's how good the team is, he good you are at several different competencies (including toilet cleaning) and if your idea of an Uber for hair extensions is the hottest new thing or just dead in the water.

This, in the end, approximates a continuous distribution.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#26

Post by graycat »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #10
graycat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

It's been a while since read the book. IIRC, you are correct.

Your extra details are good, but we still can take a simpler approach: More people means more communications, of all kinds! So, the whole thing can go bureaucratic with endless lists of requirements, considerations, ....

E.g., my solo, sole founder project code has 24,000 programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing, and large organizations, even using the parallelism you mentioned, might have taken more person-hours and maybe more elapsed time to do that than I did!

I had one of those situations: About a dozen of us. In the afternoon I heard the horror stories about the weeks of work they had to do to program the rule subroutines. Gads, their implementation would have made a mess out of the feature.

Some of the problem was a run time routine for some RETE logic. The programmers were planning to return from all the subroutines, run the RETE code, then somehow call all the subroutines again -- at best, a disaster. By dawn I had sent e-mail with a clean solution: Carry along an entry variable pointer to the RETE routine, keep it active on the stack of dynamic descendancy, and then invoke it where as needed. I got some sleep and when I got back the production code was nearly done!

How that happen? We had some bright guys, but one guy working alone overnight did better than the results of all the meetings and plannings.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#27

Post by ci5er »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #23
pul wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite. The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money. It's why people endure the pain. (It wasn't till I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.) A bootstrapped startup that you stop paying attention to will rapidly stop making money.

> I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.

Yup! Then try hitting the wall at 600 mph, after raising $100M. That ain't pretty either.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#29

Post by onion2k »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #23
pul wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite. The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money. It's why people endure the pain. (It wasn't till I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.) A bootstrapped startup that you stop paying attention to will rapidly stop making money.

The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money.

For some, sure. For many others it's to have the freedom to do something they enjoy, or to solve a pain they've encountered, or to help others. YC funds plenty of non-profits that aren't likely to ever make the founders "fuck you money" rich. In fact, most of the founders of those startups could earn much more elsewhere.

Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder (2016)

#30

Post by chillydawg »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #23
pul wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite. The point of a startup is to get rich and then not think about money. It's why people endure the pain. (It wasn't till I tried starting one that I realized just how painful it is.) A bootstrapped startup that you stop paying attention to will rapidly stop making money.

Or you hire a manager/staff to run it?
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