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Two creators are not always better than one

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Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#91

Post by get_off_my_lawn »

briandear wrote: post #79
PaulHoule wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But when a good part of your company involves marketing, blogging, content marketing, qualifying leads, talking to potential customers, supporting customers, dealing with advertising, going to conferences (where your target customer is,) that’s a huge amount of “non-technical” work that has to get done. Many technical founders consider a non-technical founder as somehow “less important” that the tech, but it’s defini…

> Many technical founders consider a non-technical founder as somehow “less important” that the tech, but it’s definitely is the opposite. All the great tech in the world doesn’t mean jack if you can’t sell it.

And all the marketing skills in the world don't mean jack if you have nothing to sell.

A technical founder who can create a product and market it with average efficiency can still be successful, unlike a non-technical sales guru with no product.

So I'd say the technical person is till the more important one.

P.S We're also ignoring the fact that many technical founders are also great at marketing themselves. Unlike a non-technical one, who isn't technical by definition.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#93

Post by Lumenora »

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…

Paul G. says it's just because it can be hard and lonely being a solo founder. It isn't a filtering tool necessarily.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#94

Post by BerislavLopac »

A startup has three main functions:

    - define the product
    - build the product
    - sell the product
As long as you can successfully execute all those functions, it doesn't matter how many people you have doing it, and it becomes the matter of resource availability.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#95

Post by darkerside »

tokyodude wrote: post #84
darkerside wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 useles…

The problem is there's no easy way to know which things will actually make you more productive and which won't. Will switching to lisp make me more productive or will it just mean I have to re-write 30 libraries from scratch that aren't written in lisp? Will that productivity multiply as I hire more people or will the fact that it's hard to find lisp programmers mean my options to expand will be limited? Does lisp wo…

For Lisp in particular, you're probably right about many of the tradeoffs. You won't benefit from a large ecosystem, you won't find as many job candidates (albeit likely a higher quality of average candidate), and it's probably not the best language for large decentralized teams that need to coordinate development (although, what language is?).

The lack of knowing you reference is exactly what I'm riffing on here. There are people who have leveraged Lisp features to huge benefit, and there's just no easy way to explain those features to people who don't use Lisp. "There's no way to say it in that language". To outsiders then, Lisp looks like a back-patting cult with no tangible benefits and yet an air of elitism. Similarly, those with "people skills" can't always explain the mental framework and skills they've built up to make themselves excellent at working with other people, but they can easily recognize those skills in another.

EDIT: Here's the article. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

The whole thing is well worth the read, but for what I'm talking about here, you could skip down to read about the Blub paradox.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#96

Post by Vanderson »

avinium wrote: post #89
Vanderson wrote: post #4

I am a solo founder. And I didn't see any mention of actual income value of the "successful" businesses in this article. I suspect you can easily get more successful very small businesses a leg up in sheer numbers alone just from personality conflicts wrecking multi-founder businesses. I had a partner very early on, and it didn't work out. And it was really nice having someone on board that really cared about success…

In your view, why didn't it work out?

Personal problems with co-founder. I wasn't mature enough (I really had a lot of personal issues myself) to truly help that person overcome their issues. Eventually he stopped being productive and just played video games. He knew he was screwing me over, but he simply couldn't get out of his own personal funk. (it was the days of Everquest and large group raids, it was really bad)

In retrospect, I really really wish I had been more patient and actually tried to encourage him and get him back on track.

I learned a valuable lesson from this though, to not let my temporary grief blind me to other people's distress.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#97

Post by njarboe »

Jerry2 wrote: post #88
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 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. No, investors prefer two or more founders because it dilutes the power of any individual and makes it easier for investors to play founders against each other and water down the influence of either of them. It makes investors much more influential.

Maybe that is the biggest reason for some/many VCs, but given how Y-combinator started, the fact it was only investing in the Angel round, and many other facts of its history, I tend to doubt it. It could be true now, but when they started and formed this idea of Y-combinator, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston and the others were running it a startup themselves basically as an experiment on how to get more startups to exist. I think Y-Combinator even followed this pattern with Paul recruiting the others to start the company. VCs were not in the small Angel level investment scene and Y-combinator was only investing $7000? grand in the early days. Rent for 3 months basically (oh, how rents have exploded since then).

As in all complex behavior, there is not "one reason" for anything and I could have better stated it as: "I think 60% of the reason Y-combinator liked to see two or more founders is that at least those two people are willing to work with/for each other. Other people saw Y-Combinator's success and followed their example (including Y-Combinator)."

It would be pretty cool if people started giving percentages to causal factors when discussing complex events. It would be a concise way to get a much more useful understanding of their opinions.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#98

Post by njarboe »

briandear wrote: post #80
opportune wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a common trope that developers lack social skills and business understanding and need a "people person" to "handle the business side." This is basically why almost every technical person at big companies is beholden to PMs (who may not even have any technical background) who get paid just as much, if not more, to write word documents, make powerpoints, and tell you what to do. And while it's true that a lot…

It’s not that technical founders don’t have people skills: they don’t have the time. Going full bore into product development only to be interrupted by a potential customer asking about pricing plans is a big time suck, but it’s vital if you are actually building a real business.

Wild speculation: It is the founders that have developed a deep understanding of both computers and people that are likely to be successful. These two domains are very deep and take a long time to learn well (say twenty years at a minimum). Studies suggest that generally people focus on one or the other (men generally focus on understanding things and women focus on understanding people). Find those people who did both at a young age and give them some resources to run a business and they might do very well. As Paul Graham said somewhere, these types of people are only likely to want to start a business as mundane as "make file backups really easy and reliable" if they will be very successful and that success will let them hang out and work with similar people.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#99

Post by njarboe »

_hyn3 wrote: post #83
pmichaud wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are able to recruit founders to work with each other, you didn't prove anything that couldn't be just as easily proven by recruiting a VC to invest in you. Eh, I think this is spurious. The specific post you're replying to is about a signal that seed funders can use to predict if founders have what it takes. Seed funders can't really use the signal of "did they get VC money?" Also, technical proof of concept…

> Eh, I think this is spurious. The specific post you're replying to is about a signal that seed funders can use to predict if founders have what it takes. Seed funders can't really use the signal of "did they get VC money?" That's a fair point, but my point was really: if they can convince you as an investor to actually put in money, then they certainly have sales skills that outclass those of acquiring some random…

My idea was more that one cofounder probably had an original idea, but then got another person to work with them on it. In the best case both people are working on the project in large part because they want to work with the other person. The project the two work on probably evolves enough between the two people that at the point they get to talking to an Angel, they can both claim full half credit and feel like equals in the endeavor. People who can do this are much more likely to be able to grow a business quickly like Y-Combinator tries to do.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#100

Post by ata_aman »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #76
nissimk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that sales would be easier to measure than tech because successful salespeople have a track record with dollar amounts sold.

I’ve seen people do really well at sales within one organisation completely fail in another. Dollar amounts between salespeople are really only comparable within a given company and maybe not even then taking into account different territories, product lines and times.

Agreed. Sales in big companies is also extremely different than sales in startups. Hard to measure how much of the sales is happening because of big company X being your employer (carrying the weight of the process).
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