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It's not a matter of skillsets; it's a matter of communication. Having a co-founder lets you bounce ideas off one another. It lets everything you do take on it

by rriepe 17y ago

It's not a matter of skillsets; it's a matter of communication. Having a co-founder lets you bounce ideas off one another. It lets everything you do take on its own natural evolution. It's hard to explain unless you have a co-founder that you can easily and quickly communicate with, but I'll try. You could compare it the show House MD. House is a brilliant medical mind, and much better than anyone on his team. Why does he even have a team, you ask? To throw ideas back and forth. When he can't access his team, he'll go to anyone to keep the idea in the air. He's even used a bum and an ex-con. As an individual, you can train in all the skillsets in the world. You can become better at front-end, back-end, business development, selling, talking to people... everything. You can be even be better at coming up with ideas. But you'll never be better at developing ideas. That's the strength of multiple founders.

pmjordan 17y ago
House, being fictitious, might be a bad example though. It's a TV show, so he needs a foil, how else are the viewers supposed to know what he's thinking? Besides, House is great because of the dialogue writing. I'd say how good a programmer I am doesn't depend on whether I have company. Being a sole founder sucks because there's just so much to do and it's easy to feel overwhelmed, which means you can lose motivation very quickly, and there's nobody there to help you get fired up again.
- rw140 17y ago
  It might depend on your personality - although you can be sure that you can be a good programmer 100% of the time, I know I occasionally make decisions that, in hindsight, are significantly stupid. Currently I can sanity-check things with my co-workers (or at least those of them that can spot signs of my stupidity) - if I were a sole programmer, that resource would not be available, so I'd either spend much more time checking my work, or end up wasting more time doing things the wrong way. Possibly even both.

by rriepe 17y ago

pmjordan 17y ago

House, being fictitious, might be a bad example though. It's a TV show, so he needs a foil, how else are the viewers supposed to know what he's thinking? Besides, House is great because of the dialogue writing. I'd say how good a programmer I am doesn't depend on whether I have company. Being a sole founder sucks because there's just so much to do and it's easy to feel overwhelmed, which means you can lose motivation very quickly, and there's nobody there to help you get fired up again.

rw140 17y ago
It might depend on your personality - although you can be sure that you can be a good programmer 100% of the time, I know I occasionally make decisions that, in hindsight, are significantly stupid. Currently I can sanity-check things with my co-workers (or at least those of them that can spot signs of my stupidity) - if I were a sole programmer, that resource would not be available, so I'd either spend much more time checking my work, or end up wasting more time doing things the wrong way. Possibly even both.