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Is anyone aware of similar data on the YC company set?
YC pushes against solo founders. Dropbox was a notable one (even though Drew Houston added a "co-founder" right about when they were accepted...)
This is important for VC businesses, where hiring quickly is the only way to grow. But it's not important for smaller businesses, where cash management matters more.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC pushes against solo founders. Dropbox was a notable one (even though Drew Houston added a "co-founder" right about when they were accepted...)
Investors in general prefer multiple founders, and they want the founders to have roughly equal equity too. In part this is because they want the ability to push a founder out if he/she isn't working out.
A downside is during those times when you work less, little happens.
From the article: >The research is based on a survey of creators for thousands of Kickstarter projects between 2009 and May 2015. From the paper: >This suggests that the taken-for-granted assumption among scholars that entrepreneurship is best performed by teams should be reevaluated, with implications for theories of team performance and entrepreneurial strategy. The claims in the paper are pretty limited and based…
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 ot…
==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.==
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 ot…
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors in general prefer multiple founders, and they want the founders to have roughly equal equity too. In part this is because they want the ability to push a founder out if he/she isn't working out.
I also hear that it's protection against a founder quitting. Though this to me seems dubious as I would guess that sole founders are much less likely to quit prematurely (for obvious reasons) than a co-founder.