Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!

I'm really on the fence about this because both arguments have truth to them. If you look at many successful companies, they were often founded by two people. However you'll also find that usually one of the founders leaves eventually (usually after a short while compared to overall lifetime of the company), and the other stays to run the company.

I can give a whole bunch of examples. Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Microsoft: Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Valve: Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Id Software: John Carmack and John Romero. People split for various reasons, sometimes due to disagreements. Sometimes personal reasons or change of interests. In the end most companies seem to end up being run by one person whether or not they were founded by more than one.

There are also successful companies that were founded by one person, like Dell and Amazon. So to me it seems that statistically speaking eventually you'll split up and one of you will have to leave the company.

Ultimately it seems that the co-founder issue is mostly an issue of initial mutual support. It's tough to go through the early stages on your own, and having someone to share the workload with and get moral support from increases your chances of success. But it can only truly work in the long term if you decide at the beginning that one of you will be the president and have the final word in major decisions. Otherwise it's a recipe for trouble down the road.

this wasn't started by just one person, though. granted evan finished it by himself, proving the point below about co-founders leaving.

BitGeek:

Your post is simply amazing. I couldn't agree more. Having multiple co-Founders does not guarantee success but also does not guarantee failure. But if a startup with multiple co-Founders were to somehow become successful, it is still very difficult for it to grow beyond the bootstrapping stage. I actually have one chapter planned for my on-line book to be entitled "Middle Management Gone Wild" which is what happens to the later stage of a successful startup with multiple co-Founders. It is the same difficulty that a hunting party would have growing into a village.

Thanks again.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu

http://www.startupforless.com

The fact that most plane crashes are due to engine failure doesn't mean planes shouldn't have engines.

All you have to do is look at the empirical evidence. Successful single-founder startups are so rare that they're famous on that account.

I'm not saying that having a cofounder is so important that you should take someone lame, or someone you don't know well. Maybe if you can't find a cofounder you're just screwed; I don't have enough data yet to say for sure. But someone going into a startup as a single founder should be aware they're doing something that, for whatever reason, rarely works.

I mostly agree with this, except I also think it's pretty important to have at least one other co-founder... but it's even more important for you to be able to trust and work well with those co-founder(s).

Going out and finding some random dude that you don't know or trust to be a co-founder for the sake of having a co-founder seems like a huge gamble and just a bad idea.