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"What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting
by antileet 16y ago
"What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best."
Well, Taking all my close friends, who might be comfortable working with me - and filtering out those who are from a CS/Programming background, exhibit genuine hacker mentality, can delay gratification sufficiently by not immediately jumping into a well-paying job, and can work in a similar pace as mine - I'm left with a pretty small set. And that set didn't graduate with me, so the argument that the very fact that I don't have anyone starting a company with me does not sufficiently imply that my idea is poor or that my convincing skills are sub-par might not be perfectly valid.
I agree with most of the things that PG writes about, (who doesn't?), but I find something wrong on a fundamental level with the justification of why single founders are a bad idea.
From a single founder, I fear there are other reasons why a startup might potentially fail with a single founder:
* One might get too easily tempted to quit, and won't get easily talked out of it.
* There's nobody to push you to work when you're feeling lazy. This can lead to a lot of time being wasted.
* Ideas need to be bounced back and forth. They must be criticized again and again until no criticism can be made about them. There's nobody to do it with here.
* If you have co-founders you always have company if you want to get some coffee, or play something outdoors :)
I'm hoping that once I launch and am able to demonstrate my abilities and ideas (or the lack of them), I might be able to find people who are willing to work. I look forward to saying "Hey, do you want to help me improve this great product which is doing quite well" instead of "Hey, do you want to drop everything in your life and hack on my neat idea".
- skowmunk 16y agoAm in a similar boat, most of my trusted friends who have given me good advice over time and could be good co-founders are not in the IT/CS area. ( What to do, I am from Mechanical/Industrial Engineering background) The two friends who are extremely capable in this area of IT/CS, one of whom has a high interest coming on board with my start up, both have heavy constraints with family, requirement for financial stability and visa regulations. In this case, I would disagree with PG' statement that not having friends as co-founders is a mark of no-confidence.