The Co-Founder Mythology - Mark Suster

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2522

by amitvjtimub • 16 years ago

109 27 16 years ago

ecorner.stanford.edu

DanielKehoe• 16 years ago

He says, "I'm not telling you don't do it... [but if you have a cofounder] make sure you have founder vesting."

comatose_kid• 16 years ago

Why editorialize a submission title?

esun• 16 years ago

What editorial? Co-founder mythology is the title of the clip.

Are you referring to the part about singles watching the video? It's a recommendation. Doesn't favour either side of the debate.

gojomo• 16 years ago

"Single founders need to see this" is unwanted editorializing, especially the emotional-heightening 'need' word.

The mere fact that it's been submitted (or upvoted) is a recommendation to view. If it has special relevance for single founders, that can be included matter-of-factly: "The Co-Founder Mythology - a defense of single founders".

(And to further quibble: it's not self-confident single founders who 'need' to see this -- they already know cofounder risks! It's those who are biased against single-founder startups.)

xal2• 16 years ago

The situation he describes is a lot more common then you guys probably think.

Amazing things happen in a great partnership, but it's as rare as breakaway success companies, and probably highly correlated.

Get the founder vesting, also forget about 50%/50% it's the dumbest way to start the company.

petenixey2• 16 years ago

Tobi, you guys have done very well, what was the early story for you?

revorad• 16 years ago

http://mixergy.com/tobias-lutke-shopify-interview/

zackattack2• 16 years ago

why is 50/50 the dumbest way to start a company?

xal2• 16 years ago

because it pretends that 2 people of exactly the same value to the company. What are the odds of that?

damoncali• 16 years ago

It's not. Sometimes it works wonderfully.

petenixey2• 16 years ago

Co-founding is often spoken of as if it's a binary state as Mark points out, it's not. A cofounder who's not 50% committed is a more expensive and less use than a 100% committed first employee. First employees take salary though which takes investment and investors require co-founders.

It's a shame that the data on this is going to become more and more sparse over the next few years as investors locks in on multiple co-founders and single founders become more and more rare.

moge3• 16 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Stated this in a previous comment but I would much rather a salary taking (and potentially equity holding) first employee than a co-founder just for the sake of having a co-founder.

zackattack2• 16 years ago

hey matt mireles, why isn't speakertext powering this site?

MediaSquirrel• 16 years ago

Working on it, bro.

bretthellman• 16 years ago

From my experience you don't need 'cofounders' as much as you need capabilities like design, engineerings, marketing, the optimist, the networking machine, etc... Some people have only one of these skills and need to make up for the others with employees or cofounders. Others have more than 1 skill and can push a product farther along.

joakin• 16 years ago

I just saw the entire talk, and its very interesting from start to end.

I would recommend it to anyone that feels the 'entepreneurial tickles'.

Also, in my opinion, the lean startup and fail fast chapters give really good advice.

Thanks for posting this

moge3• 16 years ago

So I am a single-founder. For me, and it is worth nothing that I have a sum total of 28 users on my site, it is not that I feel that I need a co-founder or even a partner. What I need is a collaborator!

Everyone, everyone, everyone says to me 'oh, your a single-founder. When are you going to get a co-founder?' I feel like a handmaiden sometimes.

All I really want, desperately need, is a collaborator, a mentor, a sounding board. If that person is co-founder so be it. Funding should be dependent on team and 'team' is not always a 'founder'.

...sorry I know that was slightly outside the scope of the topic, /rantoff.

gscott• 16 years ago

I think your product relies on mass adoption. Rather then trying the shotgun approach (try to sign up millions of people so you have enough people to 'hang with'" a facebook app where a person can schedule a number of events they are going to that others can join in on then tie that data back to your main site.

moge3• 16 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Second time someone has mentioned doing a FB app. I had not considered that previously. I can see how doing that would give us a deep reach. Tying the data back to the site is also interesting. Thanks again for the feedback!

8ren• 16 years ago

aside: odd he didn't mention Hewlett and Packard, Woz and Jobs, Gates and Allen, Warnock and Geschke (Adobe), the intel founders, oracle founders. Most (not all) seem to fall into tech vs. biz roles, with overlapping abilities.

I would have thought the most important benefit of co-founders is someone to bounce-n-build ideas. But the dual tech/biz roles really suggest it's based either on abilities for different tasks; or on modularizing the complexity of dealing with those different tasks.

As an example of the latter: I've recently experienced of this as a one-founder in that when negotiating a large and complex contract, I simply don't have any of that extra spark of intelligence/gumption/whatever left over to overcome the complex technical obstacles that regularly come up.

The Co-Founder Mythology - Mark Suster

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