PG explicitly gave justification for this: "Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the

PG explicitly gave justification for this: "Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder." That does seem to be true. But I wouldn't think that implies a need for specialization, nor that it would help. For further comments on the subject, Philip Greenspun has written substantially about how small teams of two or three consultants handling everything associated with a project would outperform, in terms of time, money, quality, and customer and consultant satisfaction, more specialized, supported teams. That's contingent upon picking the right people, and training them the right way: communicating the right values, building up a well rounded skill set, getting people thinking about the customer and how to them to pay for stuff. When VC's took over and the structure was rearranged to encompass business specialists, and hr experts and so on, the company rapidly collapsed. There were other factors too: Joel Spolsky writes that the consulting market collapsed in general, but ArsDigita had big customers, which actually didn't go away, they just started doing things in house because ArsDigita got worse. He explains some of this in the following link: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html