Ask HN: Is it practical to have many (4+) simultaneous co-founders?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299537

by daniel-levin • 13 years ago

8 6 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Some context: I am a university student with some ambitious ideas about a robotics startup. I'm asking HN about many co-founders because I feel that this forum is frequented by founders and technologists - which lends verisimilitude to the answers I'll receive.<p>So, here it is: I am considering starting a company with many co-founders. I have a large pool of motivated and intelligent people with whom I'd consider starting a company. Most startups that I read about have 2-3 co-founders. However, if I were to start a robotics company, there would be a very large set of responsibilities from the start (hardware engineering, branding/marketing, supply chain, operations, software, manufacturing, original science) and thus I would think these tasks should be distributed amongst 4 or more specialised founders. Obviously, this question mainly applies to companies that produce actual physical, manufactured products.<p>What are some of the (dis)advantages of starting a company with many cofounders? Sun Microsystems and Fairchild Semiconductor were started by 4 and 8 people respectively. Does HN have any stories or advice?

jefftala• 13 years ago

Bare careful of too many cooks in the kitchen. It's tough to make quick, strategic decisions when you have so many people with an equal say.

Ask yourself if all these key people are really founders, or just the first employees with stock options?

ag_47• 13 years ago

>> Ask yourself if all these key people are really founders, or just the first employees with stock options?

This. Pick 1-2 "key people" out of the pool, and invite others as employees. Don't make things ambiguous, you should prepare and have everyone sign simple contracts outlining the conditions.

snowfox• 13 years ago

I have no experience on hardware startups. But my gut feeling is that they do have additional layers of complexity relative to pure web startups. As such it makes sense to have somewhat more co-founders than web startups.

However, the more people you add to a team, the slower it moves and the team dynamics grows exponentially. It will reach a point after which you get diminishing marginal gain, or even negative gain.

For a startup I believe agility is critically important. I would be worried to add too many people from the outset because it is difficult reverse it. It's hard to 'unfounder' a cofounder later on. My advice is to have a core team of 2-3 cofounders to see how it goes. If you really feel insufficient after a while, bring one in one at a time. It is less risky than having too many in the beginning and discover problems when it's too late.

ja27• 13 years ago

I tried to start a company with 6 co-founders once. Never again. More co-founders increases the odds that one of them will kill the entire thing. More co-founders increases the odds that two of them will have a fight and split.

Start with 2-3 co-founders and use other people to help get things going. They might do it for fun, a little cash, a little stock, or just the promise of bringing them in when it gets big.

speeder• 13 years ago

We are in five. But one has 50%+, two are investors that don't get in the way, and the other two are tech and art.

I am the tech guy, but I am.also the most experienced in the field, so I have some power too. But overall the structure is: CEO leads, I help. The others keep us two checked.

Never we made we tried to.make a full blown decision by everyone.

argonaut• 13 years ago

You are really misusing the phrase "co-founder" here. You do not have 5 co-founders.

Only one of the 5 is really clearly a founder (the one with 50+%). The other two are somewhere between "co-founders" and "founding employees". Especially since you acknowledge that there is an inequitable division of power/decision-making. In a situation with co-founders in the purest sense, all co-founders would have equal power. And then you have two investors, who are not co-founders.

The two "co-founders" with less than 50% are "co-founders" in the same sense that Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin were "co-founders" of Facebook. They were co-founders officially, but they were obviously 2nd to Zuckerberg and had far less power than he did (and none of them are at Facebook anymore) and were probably more like founding employees.

At most you could say you have 3 co-founders. But really the closer truth is that you have one founder.

Ask HN: Is it practical to have many (4+) simultaneous co-founders?

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