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Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

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Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#41

Post by 0x12 »

NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #39
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates had Paul Allen, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger. You can argue that one-half of these duos produced more than the other but would they have been able to without the support of the other half?

Allen and Woz both left early on. Allen was in a plane wreck and/or got cancer or some such? Woz was gone before Jobs was at Next, Pixar, or back at Apple. I'm sure Jobs had a mother, also, but as I wrote, and is clearly the case, Apple, that is, the currently successful company, was a one man show from Jobs. While Munger is a bright guy, my reading is as I wrote it: Berkshire is a Buffett show.

I think you're missing the point here. How they parted does not matter much. What matters is that without the other they would have never made it to where they got.

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#42

Post by 0x12 »

The downsides to having no co-founder:

  - you get to deal with the stress on your own (or maybe you have a 
    supportive spouse)

  - you can't have soundboard sessions with your co-founders

  - you can't divide the labor 

  - you have to have a lot of expertise in a variety of fields

  - if you get ill early on it will likely kill the company

  - nobody will call you out when you're spouting nonsense

  - likely a long long list of stuff following these
The upside (and it's a huge upside)

  - you don't have to deal with your co-founders
That one single factor does not outweigh the other ones but it is much better to have no co-founders than to have the wrong co-founder. And you can't really know in advance if you have the right co-founder or not. You'll know when you are in your first very heavy weather but by then it is too late to easily switch.

That's why even if having co-founders is good plenty of people chose to go it alone, and end up hiring what would have been co-founders as early employees once they've established a certain level of success.

If having no co-founders was a guaranteed fail nobody would do it, but plenty of people get by just fine to prove that it is not a hard and fast law, but more of a statistical issue.

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#43

Post by DaveChild »

phatbyte wrote: post #28

I'm also a single founder, and I'm investing part of my own money that I've been saving from all these years as a developer. Being a single founder is hard, you have to deal with everything from incorporating, accounting, writing code, design, worry about SEO, how to introduce your project to the world get some momentum, etc.. Plus, add that to the fact that I'm from Europe, VC is very complicated here. But because i…

> I'm working on it for at least 3 months now and it's 90% complete

Good luck with the other 90% ;)

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#44

Post by ridruejo »

NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #39
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates had Paul Allen, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger. You can argue that one-half of these duos produced more than the other but would they have been able to without the support of the other half?

Allen and Woz both left early on. Allen was in a plane wreck and/or got cancer or some such? Woz was gone before Jobs was at Next, Pixar, or back at Apple. I'm sure Jobs had a mother, also, but as I wrote, and is clearly the case, Apple, that is, the currently successful company, was a one man show from Jobs. While Munger is a bright guy, my reading is as I wrote it: Berkshire is a Buffett show.

A cofounder is most critical a factor in the early stages of a business. Apple and Microsoft were already established companies to a larger degree when the cofounders left

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#45

Post by [deleted] »

abbasmehdi wrote: post #16
geoffschmidt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startups are just so much work. You need some help. For example, if you have two founders, then one can go out and do fundraising for a month while the other keeps the company running. If you had only one founder, you'd be dead in the water for that month. (Even if you have employees -- things are going to decay if all of the founders are distracted.) Also, I've never known YC to play founders against each other.

Great point, I'd also add emotional support in the darkest hours.

[deleted]

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#46

Post by ig1 »

sunnydaynow wrote: post #40
ig1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You presumably know far more professional developers at a later stage of your career than someone fresh out of university, so you have a far bigger pool to find someone out of. Most of the people who are just finishing university and getting into YC aren't people who would be struggling to find jobs, these are people who are choosing to work for a startup over going to work for Google or Goldman Sachs for a six-figur…

The 25-year old knows that if his startup fails he can easily find a first (or new) job at Google etc two years later. That does not apply to 45+ year olds. The risk is much higher.

I don't get this, presumably by that point in their career they'd have a huge network of people they've worked with in the past and who would be eager to hire them ?

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#47

Post by NY_Entrepreneur »

abbasmehdi wrote: post #16
geoffschmidt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startups are just so much work. You need some help. For example, if you have two founders, then one can go out and do fundraising for a month while the other keeps the company running. If you had only one founder, you'd be dead in the water for that month. (Even if you have employees -- things are going to decay if all of the founders are distracted.) Also, I've never known YC to play founders against each other.

Great point, I'd also add emotional support in the darkest hours.

Naw! A good hacker has some BIG advantages!

First, he KNOWS that his code works! This is a BIGGIE because there isn't a critic in the world who can write rhetoric that will stop or even slow the code from working! No matter how many nasty words might be said, the code will still WORK! That's a BIGGIE. Can sleep well on it and maybe soon take it to the bank.

Second, the hacker has in his good code a great example of how to solve problems, an example that applies not universally but, still, significantly more generally. So, one of the first ways the hacker knew his code was good was when he gave it a severe desk check. There he went through the code as a 'logical path' that connected end to end. Well, that's a GREAT 'problem solving paradigm', one of the very best of all! So, apply that paradigm where can to some of the other issues in the startup. E.g., a biggie is, will users and/or customers like it? Well, if have a good solution for a big ass, hairy, stinking problem people are screaming to have solved and for which there is no good solution, then, sure, just found your 'end to end logical connection'.

The run out of cash worry? Do the checkbook arithmetic; then do good planning; then execute the plan well; then no worries, mate.

Net, rationalize, don't emotionalize.

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#48

Post by dmk23 »

joshuamerrill wrote: post #26

As a single founder who's about to close his seed round (and was rejected from YC), I'm deeply concerned that opinions toward single founders are devolving from aversion, to bias, to self-fulfilling prophecy. With every step, investors are forfeiting the ability (or inclination) to evaluate this issue on the merits. I personally have no trouble working with others, nor difficulty enrolling others in my vision. I am e…

I take a very simple perspective on this "single founder aversion".

If some investor is going to ignore my traction and business just because I achieved it without signing on a token co-founder, then frankly it is their loss and I won't hesitate to politely tell them that. By definition getting to the same results without co-founders requires a much higher level of ability than if being part of a "collective". Any investor failing to recognize that is going to miss out some of the best deals and that is really their problem.

The main focus should be on pleasing customers and partners and if you do that right, eventually the right investors come along (with better terms too). Much better approach than to structure your company solely to please investors and forget what the business is all about.

You might even end up with a business making money and no investors to answer to (or at least investors not having significant control over you). What a terrible thing!

PS: Quite a few people promoted to "co-founders" should really be employees with accountability for specific tasks and projects, not an open-ended license to call the shots.

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#49

Post by ridruejo »

seunosewa wrote: post #30
wlievens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as soon as Dropbox becomes liquid, it will certainly be the biggest homerun.

Unless it fails, of course.

At this stage it cannot "fail" in the traditional sense. Even if it enters a downward spiral, at any point in time it could be sold for the user base alone (and the price would still likely to be bigger than Heroku)

Re: Paul Graham, Dropbox and The Single Founder Exception

#50

Post by NY_Entrepreneur »

0x12 wrote: post #41
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allen and Woz both left early on. Allen was in a plane wreck and/or got cancer or some such? Woz was gone before Jobs was at Next, Pixar, or back at Apple. I'm sure Jobs had a mother, also, but as I wrote, and is clearly the case, Apple, that is, the currently successful company, was a one man show from Jobs. While Munger is a bright guy, my reading is as I wrote it: Berkshire is a Buffett show.

I think you're missing the point here. How they parted does not matter much. What matters is that without the other they would have never made it to where they got.

You are just flatly refusing to pay any informed attention at all to history or to read what the heck I actually wrote.

Take Gates: When Allen was still around, Microsoft was a still a small company IBM was still laughing at. Then Allen left. Gates, it was JUST Gates, went on to build Windows 3, Office, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, IE, Windows Server, SQL Server, Windows XP, and more. Gates grew his fortune from a few hundred million dollars to $50 billion or so. That growth was due to Gates. Period. And that was the significant growth that blew the doors off IBM, Sun, HP, Lotus, etc. Got it now?

For Jobs, you are really working to be brain-dead: What Woz and Jobs did with the Apple II, etc. is nearly irrelevant to what Jobs did at Next, Pixar, and after his return to Apple. Apple became for a while the most valuable company in the world due to what Jobs did, Jobs, JUST Jobs, with Woz watching from the nickel seats. Sculley? Amelio? They just helped show how bright Jobs was.

For your "would have never made it to where they got", we have no way to know that.

You are illustrating a huge point that I did make: People like to fight. Even over something really obvious, people like to fight. If you and I were cofounders, then no matter what I did and no matter what success the company was having, you'd be fighting me every way you could think of, fighting, fighting, fighting, for no good reason except you just want to be fighting. There's no way you could be effective.

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