Why I'll be a solo founder next time

http://dennybritz.com/blog/2013/08/05/why-i-will-be-a-solo-founder-next-time/

by dennybritz • 13 years ago

267 145 13 years ago

dennybritz.com

j457• 13 years ago

A partnership is more work and harder than marriage because you have to:

- get on and stay on the same page

- agree on both of your live's direction and commitment to a path has to be the same for the next 2-3 years

- have the ability to defer to each other in your area of competence

- have to be skilled at learning and getting anything done, whether its business or tech.

- know that your entry and exit goals have to be compatible. Some people want to get rich quick, others are happy with organic growth that scales as well.

- be able to have a disagreement and move on for what's best.

- remember it's not about who's right, but what's right. Have a overarching vision, mission and values that you agree with so you can test any idea against them to see "does it fit how we're trying to do?"

- understand that it's about creating value for your customers, not making your own lives easier through the latest technology that makes something easier for you in development

- remember building channel to a market is more important than anything you build.

- building a financial engine early is the biggest indicator of whether your partnership will last

- building a partnership that grows in to friendship is easier than the other way around. Build things with people who you have experience building things with, and if you're new to each other, see if you can build something small together before taking the plunge.

hnal9432• 13 years ago

Almost all of these things apply to marriage as well, minus the bits about exit strategy. If you think committing to the same direction for 2-3 years is difficult, it's not time to get married yet!

steveklabnik3• 13 years ago

A couple doesn't need to have the _same_ direction, they just need to have compatible ones.

For example, a programmer married to a doctor. They have two different directions, but if the only real compatibility requirement is that they live in the same city, then seems fine.

regal2• 13 years ago

Very often, the marriages where partners never considered nor discussed potential exit strategies should things not work out are the very same ones that, just like with the business partnerships where this is neglected, end up taking messy detours through the legal system on the way out.

6cxs2hd6• 13 years ago

This is a great list.

Re rounding out skill set, sometimes it's possible for a solo founder to make a couple key early hires. That lets you shorten this list. Some items still apply, but many don't.

Granted those folks won't have a founder level of commitment. But neither do the kind of half-hearted co-founders the OP wrote about. In fact one way to look at this is that some co-founders should be early hires, instead.

j457• 13 years ago

Agreed. If you can manage or cover these points some how, it's fine, but I've generally found them to be necessary in any successful project.

On a side note, sad face that another thread has been taken towards a tangent of exploring marriage instead of partnerships, maybe I shouldn't have said that :)

asabjorn2• 13 years ago

It is a great point that partnering with a friend is generally dangerous. From my point of view partnering with a friend automatically give you two problems; you have to maintain a friendship while developing a demanding business relationship. The cost of loosing the friendship will make it harder to make demands and walk away if necessary, even if that is objectively the better path.

I would also caution against partnering with people that think their major contribution is the ideas, connections and/or management. If you are a founder, you execute and drive the company through execution. For a tech startup that means you either drive customer traction or make the software.

j457• 13 years ago

Good points.

I've had partnerships fail with friends. And have one succeeding right now.

What it taught me is that not all friendships can handle pressure and you are only friends to a certain depth, intensity, and commitment to each other.

It's a stoic truth that I think can be explained by those friendships that we maintain over the years with little to no effort... with whom spending 24 hours is more than spending months with the wrong people.

There is an absolutely necessity to being able to turn the friendship on/off as well as work. I didn't start working with a very close friend until we were in our early 30's, and I'm glad we waited. As mature as we already were, having 10 years away from each other working on projects has increased the appreciation on both sides of the tables.

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

Interesting points, but a lot of it is contradictory to the advice you hear from successful startups, so I'd take this with a grain of salt.

"I believe that my previous two ventures failed mainly because of the founding team (which I’m included in). How do I know? Because companies with almost identical products and value propositions succeeded afterwards."

I'm not sure if you're drawing the correct lesson there. Sounds more like implementation issues. I'd recommend you spend some effort improving your ability to implement / find people who can implement and then try again.

dennybritz6• 13 years ago

You're right, correlation doesn't equal causation. However, in my specific case the implementation issues were came from issues in the team. In the end, implementation comes down to team.

(Hindsight is always 20/20, but everything we did wrong had to do with marketing and building and audience)

josh26002• 13 years ago

Not to be pedantic, but, doesn't it always?

I think it's easy to blame other people for problems, but the path to self-improvement is internalization.

Someone on your team missed a deadline which fubarr'd your project? Your fault for not checking in with them to make sure they delivering what you wanted.

Someone forget to put the trash out. Your fault for trusting them.

This is a bit dishonest, but empowering for the following reason: You cannot control other people. If you internalize the failure as your own, you can often make more strides to prevent the failure next time than by simply assigning blame.

Of course this theory must be tempered by the old Steven Winterburn quote: "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."

greghinch• 13 years ago

Agreed, the lesson from a product failing because the team didn't work together seems much less likely to be, "trying to start a product with a team doesn't work" and more likely to be, "this team didn't work".

regal2• 13 years ago

I'll chime in here and say that reading this article sounded exactly like reading about my own 3 previous (failed) partnerships.

My sole successful venture has been solo all along (not including employees), and has outlasted the rises and falls of the other businesses (during the amateur entrepreneur "too many fingers in too many pies" phase). I don't think I'd do a partnership again. But maybe I just don't play well with others?

Anyway, can't speak for the OP, but when intelligent, ambitious friends around you see that you work your tail off and already have succeeded at building a profitable business from scratch, they suddenly get really excited about starting new businesses with you that often sound great. At least in my experience though, many of these people turn out to see themselves as "the visionary" who kinda sorta checks in from time to time and you as "the worker," which, if that isn't the role you're interested in, causes things to unravel rather fast.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I suspect this is a key insight. There is a colloquialism for a company of people all trying to be 'the boss' called "Too many Chiefs, not enough Indians" (in reference to the tribal organization of Native American tribes, where in fact there was exactly one Chief who was the final arbiter) but another spin on this is "Too many Medicine men, not enough Indians."

The "fantasy" life of a startup founder is that they see things others don't (vision) and lead people who make those visions real (workers). Except you can't really lead someone with a vision if you don't know yourself how to make that vision real.

The challenges of startups are that you have to be able to "do it all" in order to know what "doing it" actually entails, then you can bring people in who can do a part of it (that you were previously doing) and know if they are doing it well or not. Folks who are visionary in their thinking but can't break that down into actionable steps toward that vision, and then break those steps into problem assignments, aren't really going to be an asset for your startup until you already have a product and a revenue stream.

Even then, there is nothing more irritating to folks than a clueless visionary. Someone who says something like "The underlying problem is energy dependence, so our goal should be to provide an unlimited energy source to break that dependence, let's get some smart people working on that!" Accurate vision, but ultimately clueless, they just slow people down who have to explain the 2nd law of thermodynamics to them (if they are patient enough).

hannibal5• 13 years ago

If you have visionary guy in your startup, he should come with good marketing skills and that should be his main job, so that he can do what he is good at. Selling the vision to customers and investors can be very valuable. Guy who knows the product sells the vision and not the actual product can be very valuable, because the actual product is moving target anyway.

"Every successful enterprise requires three men - a dreamer, a businessman, and a son-of-a-bitch." -- Peter McArthur.

jonnathanson• 13 years ago

Generally speaking, it's very hard to convince the right person to co-found a startup. It's comparatively easy to convince the right-for-now person to join on a noncommittal basis. It's not easy to patiently and persistently search for the former, when the latter is so much quicker to come by.

I failed at founding a startup under similar circumstances. This was back in school, on the verge of graduation, when the idea struck me and I decided to go for it. My timing was terrible, given that my would-be co-founders had full-time jobs lined up. Joining me, and turning down our various offers in pursuit of the startup, was a proposition somewhere between slightly insane and certifiably so.

And so I gave everyone a pass. I "hired" a bunch of them on a part-time basis -- knowing that they'd be leaving to start their day jobs in about two months, and, therefore, inadvertently giving myself two months to generate enough traction to convince them to stick around. God, I was so naive. But I'm glad I learned the lesson at a (relatively) young age.

I don't blame any of them for the failure of that short-lived startup. I blame myself. In retrospect, I realized that my own commitment to the startup had been no deeper than theirs. If it had been, I'd have hustled a lot harder to find committed co-founders.

johnathanz• 13 years ago

The misconception about what a 'founder' represents is so true. I've been guilty of it myself till I spotted the danger signs (delegating too much, modelling myself after Steve Jobs with the misconception that all I have to do is have 'vision' :P).

The reality is as a startup founder, you're expected to bear the blunt of the risk as well as majority of the tasks, from getting coffees, to setting 'vision', to product design, and coding the mundane that others don't want to do.

To this day, I still firmly believe that (on my 1st startup, so additional mileage may change that) having a diverse skillset, or the uncompromising willingness to learn anything is key to success - guess that's what PG calls determination.

So going back to the OP's view that solo founding is possible - I totally agree. You may need to hire or get help where your tech / business skills are lacking. But if you have sufficient & diverse work experience, and some financial capital, it's totally feasible to go solo.

A big BUT is the emotional support that a team can offer. This is even more so when you have a solid co-founder. The trials of startups are hard and deeply emotional (I think all founders will naturally develop bi-polar disorder - one day you feel on top of the world with your world changing idea, the next you are filled with doubt), so any kind of support from people that understand what you're going through helps - this is unlikely to be your spouse if they've never been exposed to startups or even the financial burdens of brick-n-mortar business. You can substitute with meetups and surround yourself with startup founders, but someone who doesn't have skin in the game just isn't the same.

TL;DR So while I think it's possible to do it alone, there are added benefits to being able to share the responsibility & emotional rollercoaster of a startup I also recommend everyone read 'Founder's Dilemma', good data backed analysis of pros & cons of various startup decisions like solo vs. co-founding. Bootstrapping vs. funding, etc.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Adding to what Ryan said, when the time is right for an idea, there are usually multiple competitors out there. 2 is a small sample size to generalize off of. But... There may be other reasons.

jakejake• 13 years ago

I find everything that the article says to be practical advice, but it would have a much more positive spin if the article was titled "pitfalls to avoid when building your team." Instead the author seems to have written off the chance that he will find compatible partners.

klochner• 13 years ago

Not to mention that the author admitted he was guilty of the same faults, so it should really be "pitfalls to avoid when starting a company".

barce2• 13 years ago

If two comapanies look like they are doing the same thing and one fails and one succeeds, I'd have to conclude that there wasn't enough measurement (lean startup measurement) to make apparent the difference.

icoder• 13 years ago

I think most of the 'tips' and lessons learned make sense and are useful but I don't agree with the overall message. This is like saying 'I went to two restaurants and they were no good (for various reasons that can be avoided in the future), now I'll always eat at home'

j457• 13 years ago

I don't think entirely ruling out partnership, or thinking it's the only way is right.

I've done both, and both offer interesting pros and cons. Namely if you have the ability to fund a project yourself while building it, you can be in the drivers seat more and some partners are okay with that.

Would you mind sharing your experiences?

austenallred4• 13 years ago

I think most people recognize that the team is the most important aspect of a startup - from Paul Graham allowing people to apply to YCombinator without an idea, to investors my co-founder and I have talked to being much more interested in who we are, what we know, how we get along, and why we do what we do than product or traction, I think it's safe to say that the team is the most important aspect of a company.

I wouldn't, however, decide to "go solo" next time; that may even be a worse option. You'll never find someone who you work with 100%, but you need a co-founder. Keep "shopping," find someone you click with, and have another go.

dennybritz6• 13 years ago

Good points, but I think blindly following the advice can be dangerous. That's exactly what I did. I went out to find a founding them because I knew (from books, YC, PG's essays) that teams are more likely to succeed.

What I really should have done is not "look for some team to increase the chance of success", but rather start solo, and take my time looking for the right team. Of course that's easier said then done. You don't get to know people unless you work with them over a longer period of time.

So, just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that one should go solo completely, but rather wait for the right team. Don't settle for "some team" just because someone says that teams are "better".

austenallred4• 13 years ago

Fair enough; the title was a touch misleading then. And it's not just a matter of advice, those are just evidences of people who see the most startup. I can speak for personal experience that if I didn't have a solid co-founder the product would be 1,000x worse than it is now, we'd be going in completely the wrong direction, and the implementation would have been pretty bad. I have a ton of respect and admiration for my co-founder, and without him our company would either not exist or would be pretty terrible.

marcc• 13 years ago

I disagree with your last paragraph and caution anyone reading to think hard about your statement. Working with a co-founder who isn't as committed as you are will be trouble from day one. Ultimately you will end up with disagreements about everything from equity to product direction and it will be difficult. I'd go alone before working with someone I was dragging along.

austenallred4• 13 years ago

Do you honestly believe that you can find two people with exactly the same level of commitment? You can't pretend like there aren't external factors that affect that - families, other opportunities, etc. One can be 99.9% and one can be 99.8%, but that's still different.

I'm getting downvoted like crazy, but I still hold to that statement. You will never, ever, find the absolutely ideal circumstances, but that doesn't mean you should just give up on working with other people.

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

Building a solid team does not require one or more co-founders. It is entirely possible to start a company on your own, hire employees/contractors and then recruit for key leadership positions.

Mark Suster's Co-Founder Mythology (http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/09/the-co-founder...) and comments at Startup Grind earlier this year (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHgGUFjK3c) are well worth reading/watching.

Of course, if your goal is to have a great team on paper so that an investor will feel comfortable writing you a check, let's call the exercise what it is: building a team that might build a business once it has funding. That's not building a business.

austenallred4• 13 years ago

I can only speak for my own experience; I would be dead in the water without a co-founder, and I would never try to do it alone, nor would I recommend someone else try alone.

beat6• 13 years ago

Thanks for that link. Totally grok what he's saying.

One thing I've realized is that, when pitching, I have to pitch me rather than pitching a team. Or more to the point, pitching that a: I have a real solution for a real problem for real customers (enterprise change management ain't the same as monetizing pictures of cats on the internet), and b: I'm capable of creating a company and building a team to bring this vision to life.

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

I think it's important to be honest with oneself about the motivations for starting a business with somebody else. From what I see, some entrepreneurs don't want to go it alone because they believe there's safety in numbers. If you're leaving a good job, have a family to take care of, etc., it can be easier to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing if someone else is taking the plunge with you.

This is a really bad excuse for bringing on a co-founder. In my opinion, it's a primary reason you often see bloated founding teams comprised of individuals who have similar skills, not complementary skills.

ch4ch4• 13 years ago

Completely agree with what you said, but I think you mean "complementary", not "complimentary".

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

Good catch. Although in line with my comment, some entrepreneurs are looking for complimentary co-founders. :)

jmathai• 13 years ago

I co-founded a startup that lasted for 4 years. Once we wound that down I began doing side projects on my own or with another friend of mine.

In the end I decided that I'm better off going at it alone. Mainly because I had a hard time finding someone else to join me at the same commitment level (and that's with a side project).

So I quit my job and started to bootstrap as a solo founder (this time with a wife, two kids and single income --- mine). I brought on a co-founder about 6 months in to fill out a few gaps that I didn't have the experience or time to do myself. Not having enough revenue to pay them meant equity was the only collateral I could offer.

Fast forward 2 years and I can say that without a doubt, if I was a single founder I'd probably have thrown in the towel by now.

And my co-founder is remote! 1/2 way around the world. So as the post suggests, it's harder but I don't think it's impossible.

Obviously it depends on the individual and the business. All I can say is that the value my co-founder brought to the table was different than what I originally thought. The emotional support greatly outweighed what I thought I was bringing him on board for.

If I had picked the wrong co-founder it would have been much worse than not having one at all.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

I think your (the author) ability to be a solo founder will probably be a great deal more successful simply because you've been a founder before. That's a huge leveling of the learning curve. I don't think I could recommend going solo to a first-time founder though, unless it's someone who has capital on hand to hire people to fill out the team.

Lack of skills: Don’t work with people that don’t bring unique skills (applicable to a startup) to the table. Having someone like this in your team will down the mood of the other teams members that are providing value. There is one exception to this: Bring on smart people that are willing to learn whatever it takes. Be particularly wary of people that have a certain skillset, but are not motivated to learn new skills relevant to a startup environment.

That's really great advice, but not really a reason to go solo. It's just a reason to pick your partners carefully.

wikiburner2• 13 years ago

I just figured I'd throw this out there to see if anyone has any insight on it: Do you think certain personality types are probably better off being solo founders? Maybe loners, or people who aren't people persons. Or maybe ADHD types who have trouble keeping relationships on an even keel? Or maybe the Steve Jobs egomaniac, force-of-will types (although, I know he started w/ a co-founder).

Obviously, it could depend on the nature of the startup, in that it could be strategically important to compensate for one of those "weaknesses".

dennybritz6• 13 years ago

I think it depends on what business you're in. Almost all businesses require a combination of "hustling" (sales/marketing) and "hacking (tech skills). This may be a stereotype, but I think most hackers aren't good hustlers. I'm not a good salesperson, wich is my biggest problem, but I'm trying to learn...

wikiburner2• 13 years ago

Whoops, sorry. Looks like we were typing at the same time. I just added the last line, making a similar point.

asabjorn2• 13 years ago

Severe disabilities, like e.g ADHD or autism, will definitely make it harder to successfully partner with someone. But they do not make it impossible to partner well and as you pointed out there are people with disabilities that has partnered well.

However, for a person without such problems it is probably better to avoid this extra complexity unless there is a huge upside to the partnership that compensates for the downside.

beat6• 13 years ago

I dunno. I'm very much a people person, but I'm going as a solo founder because I haven't found the right partner. My biggest problem isn't skills (I can both hustle and hack), it's bandwidth.

cocokr1sp• 13 years ago

It seems like when things got tough you focused more on what your co-founders weren't doing and less on what you could be doing yourself.

dennybritz6• 13 years ago

Yep, I definitely see that as an issue. Once you have someone that's "responsible" for something it's easy to blame them instead of doing something about it yourself. If you're a solo founder there's no one else you can blame for the mistakes..

jhuckestein• 13 years ago

It sounds like your previous endeavors failed before the stages in which you'd wish you had one or more great co-founders. What if you raise a lot of money and want to share the responsibility with someone? What if something urgently needs to be done during Christmas? Who else could you ask to cancel their vacation? (unless Ron Conway is amongst your investors ;)).

In my experience it's easier to start something alone, especially if it's not technologically difficult (i.e. most webapps). Down the line it's important for me to have wingmen, though. Even if you can carry the load intellectually, it's nice to have somebody with skin in the game for moral support when shit hits the fan. Of course anything is better than having co-founders that don't work out for whatever reason.

dennybritz6• 13 years ago

Yep, you're right. Both of my previous two startups failed in the early stages. I think down the road there's no way around hiring a great team if you want to scale..

kposehn2• 13 years ago

In particular, don’t found a startup with people that ... have newborn kids

As a startup founder with a newborn (well, 14-month-old) I would say that this shouldn't be a global condition. There are plenty like me that I know who can put forth their full commitment - because we have supportive spouses that are completely on board with our entrepreneurial ambitions.

w0rd-driven5• 13 years ago

I'll agree and raise another important point: With enough money, almost nothing is a barrier.

I wouldn't found a startup with no income and looking to leverage that success early or your family will starve. If you have an adequate enough padding though, and yes a supportive family, you can easily be solo.

kposehn2• 13 years ago

Yep!

I think a main consideration for a co-founder is the ability to weather the inevitable storm, along with the willingness to ride it out.

jsemrau• 13 years ago

As a father and sole-founder I would most certainly agree and say that a family helps you focus and re-balance while lack of money is putting pressure on both. So bottom-line lack of money is a bigger problem than having a family (which should not be a problem at all)

jmngomes2• 13 years ago

I'm a single founder and can only say the experience is rather grinding.

I'm all up for the "If you don't help, at least don't get in the way" motto. I decided to pursue my current venture without a cofounder precisaly because I didn't find enough people that had both the skills and (understandably) the willingness to quit their nice paying jobs.

For me, it doesn't really make sense to have people aboard unless they add some real value to the two core functions of what a startup needs to do: building something and sell it. It's fine if you can't build it, but you better be damn good at selling it. Photo ops and "vision, mission and values" statements don't really justify a position on a bootstrapped startup that's trying to get a product out (this obviously varies, having well connected co-founders may make a lot of difference, some people are well worth their pay just because of their business karma).

The big problem of a solo venture, IMO, is that you find yourself doing these two roles simultaneously, which can be exhausting. It is for me, at least. I can do both rather well, but after a while I start finding it difficult to focus on designing a system for scalability, designing its database, reflecting on security, writing and testing Android code, building prospects lists and getting their contacts, getting meetings and attending them, fine-tuning your sales pitch and getting the man to write out a check. And I left out all the menial work that still has to be done.

By the end of the day, you're in agony not only because of that feature that is taking too long to build, but also for not getting enough customer meetings, because of not having enough positive answers and, mostly, because launch is (or should be) just around the corner and there's still a lot of stuff to be done and no one except you to take responsibility for it.

It's an emotional rollercoaster, so having the right partner seems like a good move.

doobius2• 13 years ago

I agree that it is exhausting. I'm 2 months into a solo founded startup and the mental fatigue is not what I expected. Reflecting on it now, it certainly makes sense, but I just didn't know that it can be so taxing.

I've told myself that if I make it to a next round of funding I need to find a partner stat.

beat6• 13 years ago

Two months? Just wait. I'm 9 months in solo, and day-jobbing to pay for the bootstrap. It's incredibly exhausting.

If I could find a co-founder or two, I'd be thrilled. But finding someone really worth their weight hasn't happened yet. And I'm not going to just sit there and ignore this opportunity just because I can't find someone to hold my hand while I'm doing it. I'm going to get it out the door, even if I have to do every little thing myself.

Having a co-founder is great. But not having one is no excuse to not work.

jkestner• 13 years ago

Some investors say that they back the team, not so much the product. In which case, if you're going to need a partner to fulfill the vision you sell investors, you may want to pick one sooner.

AznHisoka3• 13 years ago

You got someone to fund you, even though you're doing it alone?

AznHisoka3• 13 years ago

Are you doing it full time or while on a day job?

jmngomes2• 13 years ago

Full time, I quit my job to dedicate myselff to this after a few rounds of discussing it and getting initial validation from both my targets (yes, it's a marketplace business, even worse to do it alone)

mcfunley• 13 years ago

You will be a solo founder next time because anyone who Googles you will realize you are the kind of moron who throws his former cofounders under the bus.

dennybritz6• 13 years ago

Sorry if it came across like that. I myself was one of guys who wasn't committed enough in a previous startup.

trustfundbaby• 13 years ago

You don't have to be sorry, I thought it was clear you weren't throwing anyone under the bus.

You're also quite the bigger person, I make it a rule not to respond to people who feel the need to use a clear insult like "moron" in addressing someone they don't know, especially here on HN. There was simply no need for that kind of disrespectful language

ghc2• 13 years ago

If you're not good at building a founding team, how will you excel at building a company? Technology and design are great, but companies are the people that they are comprised of.

There's nothing wrong with being a solo founder because being one doesn't mean you can't build a good team. But you obviously have issues with team building, so I'd work on that first or found a company with someone who is actually good at it.

choxi• 13 years ago

Recruiting employees requires different skills from recruiting cofounders. They have different incentives, different roles, and it happens at different stages in your company.

ghc2• 13 years ago

Recruiting is an entirely separate issue. Building a team begins where recruiting ends.

In this talent market (in Boston in my case) we have a difficult time with recruiting, but our experiences with team building have been far more painful (as growing pains go).

jt2190• 13 years ago

  > If you're not good at building a founding team, how will
  > you excel at building a company?

This falsely equates "team" (a group of people) with "company" (a business venture). If the business venture requires a team of people to tackle it, then obviously putting together that team is a prerequisite. However, there are many business ventures that don't require a team, and developing better team building skills in those cases doesn't make any sense.

adventured2• 13 years ago

TwitPic and Plenty of Fish come to mind (even Instagram had a very small team for a long time)

It's remarkable how far you can scale certain types of web businesses now with one or just a few people and a pile of hardware.

If you're a social person and you like teams, clearly as always that's a viable path. If you're not, and you prefer going mostly solo, it's also clear that that's a viable path. The variable is you can only build certain types of businesses going solo.

petercooper• 13 years ago

I like being a solo founder, only partly because I can't tolerate all the things listed in other people too. The main, unforeseen, problem is that while growth is not hard as a solo founder, you can quickly run out of time working on the businesses' present than anything for the businesses' future. Having other founders who can be diverted to things like funding, hiring, training, etc, is surely a huge boon, as being the day to day 'boss' but then suddenly adding one of those activities in is quite stressful :-)

seivan• 13 years ago

The biggest advantage is that you won't have anyone slowing you down or standing in your way.

Everything falls on you to succeed.

mbesto• 13 years ago

I have yet to find a single formulaic way for founders of a business to succeed.

That being said, these are my own findings/thoughts:

- Companies with 1 + n cofounders tend to be more successful

- Working (in a commercial manner) previously to the startup helps massively. You learn a lot about people's business behaviors when you actually work with them (business and personal relationships can be very different)

- Finding a good co-founding experience on your first time is extremely difficult

- Experience with project management (and more specifically stakeholder management) is very valuable

- No more how much you read about startup stories, nothing can prepare you for the experience of a business partner relationship. It's just like dating - it's all about communication and compromise.

- I like the Hustler (CEO), Hacker (CTO), Hippie (CXO) setup for internet based startups. It also helps when each one has a experience with each other roles.

GotAnyMegadeth• 13 years ago

n ∈ ℤ, n > 0

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

Get a secretary.

jmaskell2• 13 years ago

I believe that being a solo founder contributed to the failure of my startup. In short, it puts a lot of pressure on yourself, that can't be split with other members of the team. If the ship is sinking, you have to go down with it. Other friends and mentors can offer support, but they're not in the same boat as you. When times are tough, founders can help pull each other through.

I think the reasons described in the OP are more about having the wrong founding team. This is also why we have things like vesting - if someone decides not to work full time, consult elsewhere then they should lose part of their shareholding.

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

Don't take this the wrong way, but your entire rationale for having co-founders seems to be based on fear and negativity. Your comment implies that you're most interested in providing yourself with the comfort that somebody else is taking risk too and will be there to drown with you when the ship sinks.

Per my other comment, this is simply the wrong reason to bring on a co-founder. If you truly aren't confident in the opportunity you've identified and don't feel comfortable owning your pursuit of it, convincing two or three other people to come along for the ride isn't going to prevent failure. In fact, it's probably only going to make the process of failing even more stressful.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

Given the base rate of failure for all startups, simply not failing places you in a high percentile for overall success.

jmaskell2• 13 years ago

It's not about fear of failing. I wouldn't do it again unless I was convinced the venture would be successful (and I think there's a significantly increased chance of that, based on what I learnt during the failed startup and since).

What I'm saying is that having equal co-founders gives you the ability to share the workload, emotional strain and get through the pain barrier.

It's obviously not impossible to build a huge business as a single co-founder, but it's unlikely that I'd want to do it again!

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

You can either get stuff done, or you can't.

I'll take working solo any day, over working with those who can't. Been there, done that.

P.S. Also applies after s/can't/won't/ . And corporate life is full of cases that leave you wondering which apply and in what percentages. "Team" is not a panacea -- not from my perspective.

P.P.S. I do not mean to ignore the roles and need for training and learning. But there are people who hardly seem to benefit from, or even genuinely engage in, these.

woggg• 13 years ago

"This is one of the reasons why young people often make for particularly good founders. They don’t have a lot of other commitments."

Bleah. It's a balance of ability, interest, commitment, urgency and experience. Interest and commitment are not the same thing and neither is urgency. Experience does have value.

You limit yourself pretty badly if you follow this youth principle. Finding a twenty-something willing to bang his/her head for 80 hours a week is about the least useful thing a startup can do.

nlh• 13 years ago

I'm sorry to sound pithy here, but it sounds like the lesson here isn't "be a solo founder", it's "build the right team."

Either way, this is an interesting perspective - thank you for sharing your experience!

rodolphoarruda• 13 years ago

In my own experience, item #1 is by far the most critical of all reasons listed. It's big enough to have pages and more pages written solely about it. I was the technical lead of an "educational platform" being developed and most of its products. As soon as two of the co-founders - out of 5 - found themselves jobs and other full time activities things started to go downhill very fast. One of the most annoying behaviors those then absent co-founders started to display was a sense of: "Why are you asking me that? Isn't this [feature/decision/scope] too obvious for you?". Hey, it's not a matter of being obvious or not; but still current or valid according to project's timeframe. I can't even elaborate on the amount of energy we lost.

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

I spent a few months a few years ago looking for a good cofounder.

Let me tell you, it was a waste of time. The odds of running into somebody where everything initially meshes are astronomical. And you're already facing long odds as a startup, why add to the stress with all that other stuff? Failure to co-locate alone is a show-stopper, much less issues about flipping versus growing, or financing versus bootstrapping, or where your real passion is, or whether passion alone is enough...

I'm glad it works for so many successful folks, although I note that many times these are college buddies who have spent a lot of time together before their startup.

This is one of those things that looks different depending on where you sit. If you're an investor, teams do better than solo founders. If you're a founder who's worked alone for many years, my conclusion was don't kill yourself trying to find a partner that probably isn't there. This is much the same as my conclusion on Venture Capital: some things are not worth chasing.

w0rd-driven5• 13 years ago

From my personal experience and from all the information I have on the sidelines, I see 2 camps arising.

1) Build a perfect product. Rally everyone around this perfection. 2) Build a perfect team. That person or people you know of where if you could just work with them on what you want to do, you could accomplish anything.

I've been in camp 2 with a friend of mine for a few months now and it's extremely difficult. It's difficult because we've yet to find an idea we can agree on implementing for the long term.

Camp #1 seems really difficult too because you have to sell a small group of people on your vision. A vision living entirely in your head.

I have no clue what's worse but I think it'll be subjective anyway. I would much rather be people in search of product than product in search of people but that's how I roll.

dnautics• 13 years ago

"Co-founders can complement each other’s skillsets, provide psychological support, and prevent you from chasing down a rabbit hole or losing sight of the big picture."

I'm a solo founder of a nonprofit (we haven't launched yet). Of course the rules are different, we don't have to "ship" anything, and there's almost no time pressure, but I find that I can get those things from my board. They were picked very carefully to get diverse domain experience and because I know I can trust them to provide intelligent ideas (they're all wicked smart) and I know I can trust them to provide moral guidance, very important for a nonprofit.

I surmise that for a solo founder for-profit, finding people who can help you with those very important assets is necessary, but you might be able to find it outside of a "co-foundership".

beat6• 13 years ago

What I'm learning as an early stage solo founder...

1. Not having co-founders is no excuse to not work. I want to turn this idea in my head into a working product. Saying you can't do it because you don't have a co-founder is an excuse, not a reason. It's not impossible, merely harder.

2. The critical problem is bandwidth. I'm day-jobbing to make ends meet, which bites even more into my time. My primary challenge now is finding a way to go full time, either with funding or with a revenue-generating subset of the functionality.

3. I'm the visionary. If I can find a technical co-founder to take over the coding work, great - better, even, because coding is bad for my big-picture focus. But ultimately, it's my product and my vision. If I find "co-founders" at this point, it will likely be just a label to make investors happy. In practice, they will be early employees.

4. Team-building, on the other hand, is going well. I'm a social person, an extrovert, and I can generate a pretty decent reality distortion field. I've been able to get help so far as I've needed it, and I think this will continue. Part of this comes from not asking too much of people, which is what the usual co-founder issue seems to be.

w0rd-driven5• 13 years ago

An extrovert is typically better at marketing and sales, namely for the social aspect. For someone like me that's an introvert and extremely shy around new people, I gain XP by tackling technical problems.

That doesn't mean technical people can't be a visionary too because you'll definitely need it. Someone that can get a complete grasp of the scope to tell you when a decision will lead you into more or less technical debt. You can make all the right business decisions and still fail miserably if you make wrong technical ones.

I'm likely not telling you anything you don't already know but I just wanted to make sure you weren't compartmentalizing things too much.

beat6• 13 years ago

I think I'm a visionary technical person. The problem I'm addressing is based on two decades of experience in enterprise configuration management - solving the forest/trees problem of seeing small technical changes in the context of bigger business changes, and/or drilling down from the big business tasks to the technical details that implement them. It's a boundary-crossing technical issue that's near and dear to my heart.

A good CTO could devise their own implementation path rather than following mine, but that's not really "vision". That's about how it works, not why it needs to exist. I can do the "how" myself, but I don't think it's a good use of my time and focus.

mef• 13 years ago

Heads up, your blog (https://blog.cameralends.com/) gives me the red screen of evil on Chrome:

You attempted to reach blog.cameralends.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.herokuapp.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of blog.cameralends.com.

lhnz• 13 years ago

There is a correlation between startup success and "founding teams" therefore investors often use the existence of a team as a proxy for a higher probability of success.

Teams can have convexity or concavity effects - that is, they have the opportunity to make you a lot more successful or a lot more unsuccessful.

Since it's hard to tell the difference between a good team and a bad team there's a lot of room for people to to create inauthentic signals by bundling together impressive-looking people that form bad teams. Therefore the heuristic of "a founding team exists" is easily gamed [0] to the point that it's losing its utility. However, since in a few cases it's exceedingly important to the success of the startup, and because of information asymmetry faced by investors it's one of the only good signals for success.

On a generalised individual startup level it was probably always more harmful than it was profitable.

In practice ask yourself:

Do you feel this person will help your company to succeed or are you just adding them because you've been told that this makes a startup more investable? If it's truly the former then take the risk; otherwise be careful, work hard and increase your exposure to suitable co-founders.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_Law

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

When it comes to business even scientists start judging too much and perceiving too little.

andrewhillman• 13 years ago

Or perhaps timing was a factor if they succeeded after. Timing plays a huge role in success.

dshipper• 13 years ago

This is a dramatic and flawed oversimplification. There's no one reason why one company fails while another succeeds. The founding team may be part of the issue here, but I almost guarantee that there were probably plenty of other things going on than just that.

api• 13 years ago

Isn't there a massive stigma against solo founders? I get that impression from most of what I read.

amberes2• 13 years ago

I allready decided to be a single founder. It's damn hard to find someone interested in starting a venture together, it's even harder finding someone on the same wavelength. I could grow a beard (omg I have!) waiting for this to happen.

I burned out working my ass off nights and weekends because my previous partner was absolutely sure he'd be able to sell our product. Which unfortunately turned out different (but that venture still makes money... Too much to let it die... Too less for it not to be a pita)

'your startup chances increase with a partner'. Yes, but I'm not interested in a startup that makes me filthy rich, I'm just looking for something to replace they daytime job where I don't have to be at an office 5 days a week and where the office can be wherever my laptop is.

I have built several succesful applications over the years (for others) where I used my UI/UX skills (and really just common sense and thinking before code/design). I can make the tech side of a project from A to Z (and in my current daytime role also doing sales and marketing as I'm the sole manager of a very small but very profitable company).

And next time I'm taking on a co-founder, I want proof that he has commercial skills because it seems anyone thinks they can do marketing and sales or that it will happen by itself or something.

johnrob• 13 years ago

I'm just looking for something to replace the daytime job where I don't have to be at an office 5 days a week

Wouldn't it be easier to simply find a job that lets you work remotely? Not every employer would allow that, but I have to think if you put a startup level of effort into such a job search you would find and land such a job in a month or two. I could be wrong (maybe you've already tried), but it from an outside perspective it seems to be the case.

amberes2• 13 years ago

Hmmm... That was just my 1st annoyance with a 'normal' job. And which company is going to pay me when during summer time I work 1-2 hours or only the really necessary/urgent stuff from a campsite somewhere? I'd rather have the flexibility to work like crazy when I want to and relax when I need it.,working for someone else is just too rigid.

What also bothers me: -working my ass off might mean I get a bonus, but this is only a 1 time thing. No boss is happy to give a raise (maybe I'm already earning above market). Slackers (laggards? English isn't my mother tongue) often earn slightly less compared to people working their ass off.

-I can put my blood and sweat into the company, but from one day to the next they can fire me (ok, they'll,have to pay a hefty fee for breaking the contract). I've got a couple of ongoing projects at the daytime job right now, and I'd worry more about the projects if they'd fire me than about getting a new job... Which is probably an unhealthy attitude.

qwerta• 13 years ago

Nice article but I disagree. I am very technical person and I really miss cofounder who would take care of social/business side.

First heaving new born children gives me focus on work. Before I would procrastinate a lot. Now I have to turn my idea into business, or there will be serious trouble. Sure I can only give it 10 hours X 6 days a week, but that is enough.

Secondly I disagree on remote location. It takes extra money (fast internet, video conferencing gear) and effort. But it also gives more freedom to choose best partner.

AznHisoka3• 13 years ago

I hear a lot of stories of people that have a tough time finding co-founders. My tip would be to not just find any random Joe Schmoe in a tech meetup, or even similarly minded people who want to be entrepreneurs. Rather I would find people who already have done a Show HN with a similar idea, or someone who launched a competitor product (by himself/herself), and ask if they want to partner with you.

You'd be surprised because most of those people themselves want a cofounder as well to take the product to the next level.

pbreit• 13 years ago

This is not a compelling reason to go solo but instead makes the case for being careful when choosing people to work with.

d0m• 13 years ago

Hey hey, what the author suggests is not that solo founder is better. It's that temporarily solo founder is better than getting fucked by adding the wrong co-founders.

georgespencer• 13 years ago

The article makes a fantastic argument... for investing a lot of time in picking your founders. This is like a single person saying that they're going to stay single forever because two previous relationships didn't work out. Except instead of a marriage here, you're talking about something which greatly increases the chances of success in an endeavour.

I'm the solo founder of a venture-backed startup in London. That's a bit like being the single mother of a kid in the projects who ended up going to Harvard. When we successfully make a 100x return on investment for our backers it will be the equivalent of that kid becoming president. This is a tough business and whilst I don't whinge because I knew what I was signing up for, OP is misguided to think the sole-founder grass is greener. Sole founders exist in a vacuum irrespective of how many great colleagues and mentors they have.

adventured2• 13 years ago

"Because companies with almost identical products and value propositions succeeded."

There's so much more that goes into a product and its success or failure than what such a simple statement would imply. That's a very thin premise to launch such a big position with.

One word rather sinks it in fact: luck

I've yet to run across an interview with a candid successful person that didn't count dumb luck as an important part of the equation. Right place, right time, right marketing, right people, right choices, right capital, and dumb luck.

Also, no two products or companies offer identical products or value propositions. That means the author isn't being objective about the situation one way or another.

startupstella• 13 years ago

I would agree with many of the other commenters but chime in with the "correlation does not prove causation" there are many other factors why the other startups could have failed: the other companies were better capitalized, had better processes, founders that worked together better, etc.

monopreneur• 13 years ago

Best advice I ever got on partners/co-founders: "Before you take on a partner, think about it long and hard, then don't".

wesleyd• 13 years ago

The common factor in all your dysfunctional relationships is: you.

mgaphysics• 13 years ago

You deserve kudos for your efforts so far. Every failure will breed some type of insight. The statement, "I believe that my previous two ventures failed mainly because of the founding team (which I’m included in)." - may be true, but could probably just as easily be said of solo founders. Especially after reading your list of deficiencies in the founding team members, they may be the same short-comings as the person staring at a solo founder in the mirror! It is sometimes harder (or impossible) to find that rare person who can wear all hats.

My major concern about being a solo founder would be the possible loss of productivity- how much more a team can accomplish over one person, and collaboration. Also, and this may seem horrible, but if we crash and burn, we can do it faster as a team, and pivot or move-on without the time equity that one person will have invested.

To answer the questions you posed at the end of your article, my two cents is that I have found it impossible to succeed at scale without an agile team (one mans opinion). I hate to preach process and organization, but if a team follows the resources available to start-ups, such as business model generation, etc. You can identify holes in the team, or where someone needs assistance. This leads to the second part of your question and the most important attributes to look for in a co-founder. They should already have expertise, but the two attributes that I would look for are Objectivity- nothing ruins like the inability to be flexible, and Leadership- in the sense that leaders tend to be people of action, they bring people along, and they celebrate success wildly.

Not that you cannot achieve success alone, but it is definitely a lot tougher to celebrate alone.

jbscpa• 13 years ago

When I visit with hot-blooded partners ready to set the world on fire I often think of this line from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969):

Butch Cassidy: [to Sundance] Kid, the next time I say, "Let's go someplace like Bolivia," let's GO someplace like Bolivia.

Right, Next Time.

Easier said than done.

m0skit0• 13 years ago

Yes, like most successful software companies were built by one man: Microsoft, Apple, Google... oh wait...

barce2• 13 years ago

"In particular, don’t found a startup with people that are busy with school, have personal issues, are traveling, or are working a full-time job." I'd like to know if there is anybody without personal issues, or what the author is trying to say in this context.

wrath• 13 years ago

In my experience the bottom line is that you need good people around you in order to succeed. It doesn't matter if that's a co-founder, a CEO, developers, etc.. If you don't have good people around you helping you in your journey of success you won't have any.

For example, in my first startup I had a very good co-founder but we were both very young and inexperienced. We didn't hire the right people to surround us and help us in our journey. As a consequence we had a great run but were out maneuvered by other companies. In the startup I'm doing now, I started with great co-founders and we then proceeded to hire more great people to surround us. We haven't completed our journey yet but the driving force in the company now is not only me (the other co-founder left to pursue other interests) but many others that share my passion and goals.

Take your time and look for people that share your vision and passion. These people are out there it just takes time. And remember, no one can do it by themselves.

If you never read it, by a copy of Good To Great (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/00...). There's a whole chapter devoted to how great companies need great entourages.

bobbles• 13 years ago

This makes me wonder if two solo-founders working together (on their own projects) but bouncing ideas off each other would be more successful than going it alone.

robomartin• 13 years ago

You really have to make a distinction between who the subject of a lot of these studies are. It is mostly young fresh-out-of-school (or still in school) guys (and gals). They generally have very little life and business experience. They are full of ideas and passion. But few have had to endure difficult situations in their lives --personal or business.

If you take that profile and suggest that success as a solo founder is possible, well, you would be wrong. The road to success is actually a mine field for most. And these young entrepreneurs, for the most part, are simply not prepared to have a steady hand at the tiller in a storm. So, yeah, that the probability for success goes up exponentially for teams is no surprise. So long as everyone is pushing in the same direction reasonably well things move forward. Add to that guidance and adult supervision (I don't mean that in a derogatory sense at all) and it could and does work well.

Of course, there are lots of examples of teams that self-destructed as things got difficult. I watched a documentary on indie game developers a while ago and that seemed to be a common theme: As they started to get stuck in the mud that can be a never-ending project partners started to become enemies and things went from bad to ugly fast.

It is my firm conviction that a well-rounded, experienced solo founder does not need a co-founder in order to succeed. You still have to hire good people to work with you, which is a fact regardless of how many founders might be at the top.

Outside of the tight-knit university-centric circles of places like SV, finding suitable co-founders is hard and fraught with problems. And this is particularly true as you get older. Everyone can get excited about launching a new business. Few are willing to put it all on the line to make it go. I've experienced this first-hand with friends. When you finally say "OK, let's do it" and start to discuss the reality of what's expected from each founder things slow down very quickly. That's when "we should do this together" turns into "Well, let me check with my wife" or "I don't think I can put in the time". The co-founder pool is smaller and smaller as you get older and/or accumulate responsibilities.

I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of businesses in the world are started and run by solo founders. I know a bunch of them. I am talking about everything, from a mechanic's shop to a software company. Partnerships are far more difficult than marriages to get right and the consequences of failure can be just as dire, if not more.

A lot of these discussions on HN tend to be software-startup-centric. There's far more to the world than web and mobile software startups. By comparison software startups are easy. That's why people can write these really amazing zen sounding introspective pieces with revelations on how they did this or that, failed and then did this or that, learned, pivoted, raised some money and eventually succeeded. Try doing that with a self-funded (from savings, loans, credit cards, second mortgages or all of the above) hardware startup, a restaurant or a dry cleaning business. The phrase "I'm all in" comes to mind. Most businesses cannot be built sipping latte's at Starbucks while listening to cool tunes. Be sure to consider context before reaching some of these conclusions.

skrish• 13 years ago

Great points. Somedays I do tend to wonder what makes founders stick through rough times and as you rightly pointed out having been through life experiences where they stick it out is a definite advantage. You tend to see through the period instead of knee jerk reactions.

I come from a family where both my grand parents & uncles used to run a small restaurant as a family business, starting all the way from the bottom. And they used to do it together for 35+ years through various family situations, sticking together. I just can't complain having seen what they went through and accomplished.

For a lot of people out there that is just life. Only in software startup world we plan for compatibility in lots of different ways. Example, there are lot of people who want to know the plan for an 'exit' even before starting up. Not wrong. Just different.

GoNB• 13 years ago

I imagine one reason investors like co-founded start ups is because of the bus factor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Or boiled down: less dependency on a single person.

highCs• 13 years ago

Thanks to Paul Graham, I've understood why starting a company with one co-founders is absolutely essential. This is because a startup idea is a vector (see the vector section): http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Starting a company solo is worse than starting it with bad co-founders because you don't know at start that your co-founders are bad and then you still have a chance.

joeblau• 13 years ago

All of this stuff is spot on. I especially like the bit about lack of commitment. Lack of commitment can even be expressed through things like someone addicted to gaming or watching to much TV. A friend of mine called those activities "Time-Stealers."

I also tried to co-found a company with someone that had all of the boxes checked. At first I was part of the vision, but as the project grew I was slowly removed from the project. Afterwards, I felt like I was trying to force the co-founder issue because "PG said you need a co-founder." After that experience, my formula is: bad cofounder < solo founder < good cofounder.

amerika_blog• 13 years ago

Having done this wrong, how I look at it now:

You cannot expect anyone else to share your dream.

You can either hire them, or find commonality in a dream.

But at the end of the day, if it's your idea, it's going to have your name on it and thus, will be what you work on the most out of all the people who touch it.

ballard• 13 years ago

OP: Business is hard, stop whining.

There's not much rhyme/reason for landing a hit, just don't fuck it up too much.

Get your meta game together and fucking hustle. If you can't work with people and (hack or hustle), you are better off doing something besides startups.

khenriks• 13 years ago

"As a startup founder you’ll be working 48 hours a day" This is something I hear founders claim all the time... Reality is they actually don't "work" that much. I challenge any of you who disagree to measure yourself for 2 week.

http://kevinhenrikson.com/2013/07/23/how-many-hours-do-you-w...

Why I'll be a solo founder next time

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