Fighting with other founders is the absolute worst thing in the world.
Don't get a cofounder because you think he/she will do all the work that you don't want to do.
Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
71–80 of 98 posts
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#72Great article. I see your point.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#73If you want to start something, and nobody is interested in your idea or you can't find anyone good enough - Just start it alone.
If you have an idea, and you know a fellow co-founder that's interested in starting up - Just start it with him and work together.
Bottom line: Instead of thinking about the non-essential stuff- Just get the first prototype up even if it might mean doing it yourself.
Any school of thoughts that places restrictions on an ideal founding team size is crap. The debate that advocates an optimum team size is no different from saying that man cannot complete a mile in under 4 minutes.
Work with what you have, not what you don't have.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely see where you're coming from, and I agree to a certain extent. It's just that there are some things that an employee may not do which I cofounder would, in my own hypothetically-played-out-in-my-head scenario. 1. An employee is less likely than a cofounder to express disagreement, especially on ideas that it seems like you are "married to". 2. A cofounder is presumably completely onboard with you and the…
Apologies if we're stating to go in circles... 1. Not if you take them into your confidence and make them know that you value their opinion. Who doesn't want the CEO's ear? Its really all about the attitude you show them (and their personality, which is something you can select for.) 2. I think that you should hire with the same criteria and standards that you find a co-founder, and you should reward people based on…
> 1. Not if you take them into your confidence and make them know that you value their opinion. Who doesn't want the CEO's ear? Its really all about the attitude you show them (and their personality, which is something you can select for.)
Very few people are truly open-minded about everything. Most have a few pet issues that they absolutely take for granted, and then a bunch that they're willing to negotiate on. When they self-assess, they see only the ones they're willing to negotiate, because the others are so obvious that no one could possibly think otherwise.
Employees very quickly pick up which issues the boss will listen to, and which will make them dig in their heels. They'll challenge you only on ones where they think you'll listen. That's great if you actually are right about your deeply-held beliefs, but it's disaster if you're wrong. You won't get any push-back from your employees; they'll just leave.
Cofounders have much more skin in the game, and they will challenge you on your most deeply-held assumptions. All the fights between founders you've seen are good things; they're opportunities for the company to correct an issue that's obviously important enough that a founder is willing to raise hackles for it. Whether it leads to failure or success depends on how willing parties are to listen & compromise.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#75I think you are confusing founders with leaders. Companies do not need multiple leaders. Just like teams, however, they do need multiple players, each providing different skills.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#76Man. Makes me want to create a satire post titled:
Absolutely, DO NOT, get married!
This is an argument for being VERY careful about your co-founder and having good agreements in place when disagreements occur.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#77The 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;…
The plane analogy doesn't work because dual engine planes are more reliable than single engine planes... unlike founding teams, engine can't decide that they want to go in different directions and engines are not insecure, ego driven, or prone to misunderstanding each other. Nor do engines have investors coming in sowing dissent between them. If you look at the empirical evidence, you will see that most successful co…
evidence? pg hasn't given any either, but he gets somewhat more starting cred than you by virtue of staking his own money on his belief. (If his advice doesn't work, he gets low returns on his investments). You two are stating as fact two contradictory things, and I (and probably most readers) am unwilling to take your statements as fact without evidence.
Can you point me to any studies about the failure rates of startups? anything that's not anecdotal or personal experience?
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#78I like the case you're making here, which mainly seems to be that if you're waiting around on a cofounder, you're trying to solve the wrong problem. Unless you already have a potential cofounder in mind, you may be opening yourself to other problems by trying to find one (delaying the project, working with someone who turns out to be not as good as hoped, etc.). So I have to agree that your advice to just start worki…
Getting along with a co-founder is nothing like getting along with a partner in a class project. I have friends that I worked great with in college. They all remain my dear friends, but... after years of hacking together, and literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code, sometimes you just don't see eye to eye.. I agree a co-founder is beneficial, but it is very different then just hacking a project out with a bu…
Well, the guy I mentioned is someone I didn't even know a week and a half ago, when I expressed to the teacher an interest in working alone. I was just saying that based on some initial work with him, my opinion had changed a little, and I could see how something similar could happen with a cofounder.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I'm trying to say that there are plenty of Facebook apps (free gifts, HTML walls) that are "viral" and easy to build, but how many of these have any chance at making money? I'm implying that any Facebook application that is useful enough to become a "founded company" will involve an external site of some sort, one that involves the same types of inherent complications that are present in any other startup. Wh…
Frankly, I grin every time I hear someone say that Facebook apps don't make money, because that's just more left for me. Consider these stats from a not spectacularly successful app: http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/smincomebig.png How many web 2.0 companies do you know that are pulling those numbers? Facebook is the most viral platform in the history of man - making it easy to get a lot of users quickly makes it…
Wait... which app is that income for? SocialMedia or Appsaholic or something else entirely? And they have no large infrastructure behind the scenes?
Going back to amichail's original comment, the implication was that making Facebook apps is really easy, and therefore a cofounder might be less necessary. The only point I was trying to make was that any Facebook app that is going to be really easy to make is unlikely to be a big revenue generator. My assumption was that any app that was going to be big enough and useful enough to generate good revenue was going to require a significant backend external website to crunch numbers and store relevant info.
So what's the point of what I'm saying? I was trying to counter the idea that building a revenue-generating Facebook app would be any easier than building an independent site. In both cases, you have to build the backend, anyways. So then we're merely talking about the difficulties of building the interface, and I was saying that it's not that hard to do with Apache and a script in just about any language: just print what you want the browser to see to standard output. Even if building a Facebook interface is easier, that is fraught with other complications (such as worrying about Facebook itself doing its own, official version of your app).
So in the end, I'm saying that building a successful Facebook app is not much different from building a successful website, so if you need a cofounder for a website, then you also need one for the app.
Re: Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly, I grin every time I hear someone say that Facebook apps don't make money, because that's just more left for me. Consider these stats from a not spectacularly successful app: http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/smincomebig.png How many web 2.0 companies do you know that are pulling those numbers? Facebook is the most viral platform in the history of man - making it easy to get a lot of users quickly makes it…
Wait... which app is that income for? SocialMedia or Appsaholic or something else entirely? And they have no large infrastructure behind the scenes? Going back to amichail's original comment, the implication was that making Facebook apps is really easy, and therefore a cofounder might be less necessary. The only point I was trying to make was that any Facebook app that is going to be really easy to make is unlikely t…
Neither. It's a single application running SocialMedia/Appsaholic ads. It's an app called My Aquarium, developed and maintained by one guy.