Two creators are not always better than one • Hacker News Board

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#41

Post by robterrin » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

I'm a teaching assistant for a class called Entrepreneurial Finance at my alma mater, which always has a good draw of entrepreneur and investor guest speakers.

One of the recent speakers was Kent Collier, CEO of Reorg (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reorg-research#secti...), an information service to the buy-side that focuses on arcane and opaque information, particularly bankruptcy. They are a smash hit that only took $1.3M in financing that now does $1M a week in revenues.

His view is that solo founders and preferable. The reason he gave was that it takes such a clear and unambiguous vision, with total dedication to that vision, that any space between multiple founders creates drag and can kill the startup.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#42

Post by nishantvyas » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

"Solo founders are twice as likely to succeed in business as co-founders" by research from Jason Greenberg, PhD ’09, and Ethan Mollick, PhD ’10 and MBA ’04.

:-)

hmmm... co-researchers to research on NO need of co-researchers/founders...

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#43

Post by _hyn3 » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #32

jordiee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a solo founder of a SaaS launching next month, I tracked my time and am at 1350ish hour in the past 10 months. This is my first startup so I made some mistakes along the way with future creep so deadlines got pushed. I worked around 35 - 40 hours outside of my full-time job a week. Felt really burnt out so skipped one month of work 3 months ago but finally trying to get into the mindset of sales and marketing. I d…

so you've been working 80 hours a week for almost a year now?

This is the norm in any high-growth startups, or at least it was for me. A few people seem to fall into things that don't require working all the time, but 16 hour days and two day weekends seem completely normal to me now.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#44

Post by baccheion » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:08 PM UTC

Based on success rates, 1 founder is best. Then 2. Then 3. Etc. One founder that's in their late 30s (ie, 15-20 years experience and effectively retired due to savings).

The trend of having 2+ founders is a compromise and a result of BS mumbled by VCs.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#45

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #39

coralreef wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers tend to want to hack and not care about sales/marketing/everything else. It turns out that doing "sales/marketing/everything else" is of significant value when building a business.

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?

@pkaye are you modeling a person who has poor people skills?

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#46

Post by darkerside » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #24

njarboe wrote: post #13

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 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 mean…

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.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#47

Post by icedchai » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:18 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #45

pkaye wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

@pkaye are you modeling a person who has poor people skills?

Have you seen Office Space?

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#48

Post by pkaye » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #45

pkaye wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

@pkaye are you modeling a person who has poor people skills?

Its just a line from an old movie Office Space.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#49

Post by icedchai » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

airocker wrote: post #35

trjordan wrote: post #12

Two founders are better than one when one of the key problems you will face is hiring. One founder hasn't proven they can recruit. Two founders have proved they can convince at least one other idiot to join them. 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.

Is being able to recruit the most important trait? I think it is overall selling that matters. Why can selling potential not be demonstrated by other means? Playing with human relationships can come later.

I'd argue that "recruiting" is a form of selling. Especially in the beginning, when you're selling the dream...

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#50

Post by burtonator » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

modi15 wrote: post #10

I think most of the research like these are pretty much useless. This is because they assume that the success of a startup has correlation with the founders/co-founders - there well might be, but imo the biggest correlation with success is time. Some startups go bust when they are launched in an unfavourable climate - sometimes the tech is too raw, othertimes the market is just not ready. Move them a couple of years…

You're right but the investors and founders can't control for time.

so you optimize for the variables you CAN control.