131–140 of 172 posts
So, in other words, the author didn't consider the failed % of startups based on founder? As in, at all, if the article is anything to go by?
The question that most people are interested in is P(Success | Number of Founders) but what the article has answered is P(Number of Founders | Success) for a couple of different metrics of "success". They are not the same question! In particular, the average number of founders for a successful startup might be low, but the chances could still be better with more founders.
It is always the much easier to discover P(Number of Founders | Success). The entire "you must get a co-founder" movement is based in it.
Seems to me that very few people can check all three of those boxes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You admit you have a main founder. Does this main founder have sorta ultimate authority? Or does he hold the singular original vision from which everyone else's vision/mission/purpose comes from? What's the equity split like among the 6 of you? What created that base of trust you describe? Was it everyone agreeing to follow the "main founders" vision, and him being respectful and not ego driven (so that the vision be…
> Was it everyone agreeing to follow the "main founders" vision, and him being respectful and not ego driven (so that the vision became shared?) Pretty much exactly that plus providing the seed round. In practice, this also definitely had a lot to do with things working out well to have a center piece that's stable, predictable and a little detached, quite the opposite of a show-off. Buying into a main vision and the…
I asked the questions because I think you might be onto something, a way to split things up and have genuine founders without the "everyone gets 1/n of the equity" equality that leads to strife.
Him putting in the seed round and other contributions necessary to give him the weight that makes it a valuable deal for everyone also seems to be a key element in your situation.
Thanks for sharing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I would go that far but I have always had very mediocre experiences with people who describe themselves as "visionary"
That's my heuristic -- those who call themselves "visionaries", "architects" or "coding ninjas" are usually those you have to stay away from.
However, somehow, they're alway seems to be able to find people who will do the job for them, from bench work to CEO work, so they can call themselves successful.
I've cofounded 4 different startups. All were good ideas that bled cash or time and flopped, largely due to infighting or founder differences. One cofounder of one of the companies got really nasty about trying to leave with the rights to the company and we other two cofounders just let him have it. He sold the rights and it's now a successful venture-backed startup with soaring profits (two cofounders). Good for tha…
Interesting data point. However, we're happily chugging along with 6 co-founders, bootstrapped to currently 30 mln us$ valuation and we've only just begun. Then again, your point about "visionaries" (with which you probably mean high-ego people needing a lot of approval) rings true to me. We're all pretty low-key hard-working people with a lot of self-reflection and humility - also it helps it's not the usual failing…
This is the key, and something narcissist don't do. It's against their nature. They thrive at hugging communication and controlling the flow of information.
1: 52.3 / 45.9 = 1.1394
2: 30.1 / 31.9 = -1.0598
3: 12.5 / 15.0 = -1.2000
4: 3.7 / 5.3 = -1.4324
5: 1.4 / 1.9 = -1.3571
Maybe the idea is that a single founder situation is preferred, but as creating a startup can be stressful, trying, and involved, maybe doing so with a single partner (that complements your skillset) is a compromise?
I had never considered creating a business with a partner/co-founder. There would just be too many issues. People have a difficult time understanding what I'm trying to do even when I explain it in plain English, so I shudder to think what it would be like if I were doing something completely new/groundbreaking/different.
I can't deal with someone nagging, draining, or getting in the way as I try to do what I'm doing. It's always been fairly clear to me that the route I should take is to found a company solo, then bootstrap it to profitability, while keeping the employee count low (43-73, or 259-585). Then not go public. That is, I should avoid dealing with a co-founder, investors, or the overhead/inefficiency/bureaucracy/politics that comes with having more than a certain number of employees.
Also, it became clear (especially in the world today with so many service-oriented companies to contract out to) that it's entirely possible to do almost anything with 42+me employees (which is the "ideal" number of employees (1 CEO/founder + 6 leads/executives/managers + 6 individual contributors per lead/manager/executive), as there's only one layer of "management").
I started several projects, most of them I would not even call startups. Most of them unfinished, some failed, some successful. I have tried several times to start something with a buddy from university, with him it's always the same: We talk about it, like the idea, I start to build it, he does not really join in and I lose motivation myself. The one product which is the most profitable (or profitable at all if you…
Could not agree more. I hate this feeling and realize that IN THE FUTURE the nontechnical/sales/marketing cofounder could absolutely have a longer lasting effect on the success of the business. However, those first months where you're building the product and he/she isn't really doing much or isn't proactive in finding ways to contribute are very tough.
In the future, I'm thinking I'll start out solo building the MVP and trying to get traction, then when there's enough, find a nontechnical cofounder whose equity is based around hitting users/sales/funding milestones.
I've cofounded 4 different startups. All were good ideas that bled cash or time and flopped, largely due to infighting or founder differences. One cofounder of one of the companies got really nasty about trying to leave with the rights to the company and we other two cofounders just let him have it. He sold the rights and it's now a successful venture-backed startup with soaring profits (two cofounders). Good for tha…
> The problem I find (and one I've seen in a lot of cofounder groups) is that most of the people who want to start startups are visionaries. It's simpler than that. Most people just prefer slacking off to working their butts off. However it's the narcissists and sociopaths that will call their slacking off being "visionary" while the good guys either just leave or start working their butts off as everybody else. Obvi…
Representing the individual desire to work for "most people" isn't your job or your right any more than it's my right to say your internal view of the world is totally fucked up if you think that way.
It's all well and fine to mention there are sociopaths in the industry, but colluding them with narcissists is unreasonable. Narcissism is simply the ability to externalize one's internal viewpoints in a way that tend to spread that same viewpoint to other's internal views, often at times without empathy for those who it infects. If that benefits the company, whose function is to make everyone there more money, then narcissism may a required trait of the company's leader. If someone can't accept that for themselves, then they should leave the company or never join to begin with.
The whole sociopath matter is another thing entirely. Sociopaths can be untrustworthy, which makes dealing with them problematic.
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No it's still a startup. It can be a very high growth startup, shooting to a $100M valuation. It's just not the wannabe unicorn that VCs want. There's a HUGE gap between what VC wants and a "lifestyle business" (I hate that term, thanks for not using it.) Redefining startup to be this very, very narrow set of "businesses that will be over $1B in valuation within 5 years" is wrong, it's silly, and it's getting worse.…
Your numbers are tautological. Everyone including your straw man vc would take 10% of 100 instead of 0.1% of 1000. 10 > 1, qed, but you don't get any points for that observation. (yes, there are situations where taking investor capital leads to divergent interests between investors and managing founders. But not gross arithmetic differences.) Obviously if the expected value of the smaller sized business is greater, y…
My numbers are hypothetical, but they are not tautological. That's my point- the VCs will take the lower expected payout, whether this is because they are bad at estimating risk or not I cannot say. I can say this is how they operate, because I've seen it, in every single startup that took VC investment.