Why PG was not right on co-founders or two points of view.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24271

by ivan • 19 years ago

2 12 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

ivan3• 19 years ago

You can run your business alone and you can be successful. There is no reason why this can't happen. Just from VC's point of view it's disadvantage.

Why? Say you created successful online web service. Alone. Than, accidentally (ex. caterpillar behind the next corner) something fatal happen to you. Who will care about running business. Do you think that by ex. PG has appetite to search for new business owner and maintainer? It's not possible to simply jump in the running train if you know nothing about business internals and by Murphy's law one day after your death application stops working due some old, forgotten bugs. Take any Y sponsored site and ask PG what he knows about its source code. This is IMHO the only reason why VC's encourage you to find a co-founder. I'm running my sites alone and still have not a feeling of burn-out :) If you don't have enough skills to implement your idea, employ someone, if you don't have enough time to work on business, employ someone.

Now think about it. If your online business idea is something what cure your customers' pain, you don't need VC's capital to be sucessful. We are living in age of blogs and other wonderful viral marketing tools. Cheap hardware and hosting. Everything what you need is courage, kind community and forget arrogance.

I don't want to say that have a co-founder is bad thing. I just want to say that this must have reason and that reason should not be the VC's opinion.

BTW: find a dependable co-founder is like find a needle in hay stack :)

davidw2• 19 years ago

I don't know... I think the statistics are pretty favorable to having a co-founder. This isn't just something PG invented. People have been saying this for years.

BTW, I'm saying this as someone who is going it alone, even though it makes things riskier.

boris• 19 years ago

"I think the statistics are pretty favorable to having a co-founder"

It's all in the details. Let's say we have the same success rate for single founder and multiple founders ventures. There are many more multiple founders startups for at least two reasons: (1) it takes some guts to go alone and (2) VC/angels won't fund solo undertakings. Since the multiple founders pool is bigger, there are more successfull startups of this kind. Here you've got your misleading statistics.

master54• 19 years ago

davidw is right.

p(success | more than 1 founder) is higher than p(success | only 1 founder)

akkartik• 19 years ago

Creating a successful startup is like finding a needle in a hay stack. So why are you trying? Because you know it's not an independent random event. Perhaps you have the same level of control over your fate in finding a partner? Think about it as another problem to be hacked at.

sharpshoot3• 19 years ago

Depends on your definition of successful. If you want to build a website which accrues large amounts of advertising revenue - sure what marcus frind has done can be considered amazing.

Even making a 100th of what he does (maybe even a 1000th) would be enough for one person. Guess what - this happens everyday on the internet.

If you want to build a google, a microsoft, a paypal or something bigger its going to be hard for one person. From the investors perspective they want companies to generate a lasting difference to people's lives. Doing that as a one man band is hard. Generating monetary value for yourself is the flipside to this. But then who needs investors.

Ivan i disagree with you.

ivan3• 19 years ago

No problem I give a point to you and Who really needs investors could be next question here to discuss.

sharpshoot3• 19 years ago

I have no qualms about people creating cash generative websites either. Especially when young - the limiting factor to how ambitious your idea is is always capital.

Creating a cash-generative site and then selling it - or keeping it on the side to supplement building other ventures in the future is a great option. I'm very much thining about this right now.

SwellJoe• 19 years ago

I've built a business solo, and I'm now building one with a co-founder. I can say, without hesitation, that the latter is better. I'm a lifetime loner, stupidly independent, and I don't play well with others, but having a co-founder is still a major net win for me. I'm lucky in that I've been working with my co-founder for years (I used to hire him for UI development work when I ran my previous company), so I know that our various skills and our personalities mesh well.

If you can't find a founder that fits well with you, and that you can trust not to screw you at the first opportunity, then going it alone is the only option. But, I'd recommend trying to find a co-founder. Sure, you can build a successful business solo...but it gives you much worse odds.

Why PG was not right on co-founders or two points of view.

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