7 ms·

Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that

by pg 15y ago

Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common. One thing they had in common was Kyle Vogt of Justin.tv, who introduced them. So in retrospect the YC alumni network was having a big effect even back then.

NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
Even if the roulette ball drops into the slot 00, the play was still a "big risk", and so was, under the circumstances, insisting on a cofounder. That is, given how much Drew had already done, a cofounder had to be mostly just downside risk. The 'mitigation' had to be minimal. Or, Drew's left hand doesn't fight with his right hand, but cofounders can easily fight. If a cofounder is really needed, then so be it. But a cofounder is always risky, and a single founder who has already done well starting the business has a big advantage just because his left hand won't fight with his right hand. Now a single founder can do much more than in past years, even just five years ago. And here's a big point: always in a startup very much want the CEO to 'understand his business'. In an IT software startup, that includes understanding the software. But software has now changed: E.g., with .NET, nearly everything needed in commercial computing, and a larger fraction of Web site construction, is already in the .NET classes. So, the work is just writing a little 'glue' code between the uses of the classes. So, the coding goes VERY quickly. But what doesn't go quickly is understanding the classes because need about 10 books each of 500-1000 pages and, even for just a Web site, about 3000 Web pages of documentation from MSDN. And, this understanding of .NET is just 'overhead' that have to pay just once per programming task solved with a .NET class actually understand well. So, to 'know his business', a CEO needs to know the relevant parts of, say, .NET. A cofounder can't help here. And once the CEO does have that .NET knowledge, there can be some serious question if a cofounder can add much. Just what the Linux world has in place of .NET I don't know, but it can't be both small and effective. There is other evidence: Look up and down Main Street at the successful businesses that have been started there. Typically there's only one person who is the real 'founder'. Look at research: Bright ideas come first to just one person at a time. Period. Microsoft: A Bill Gates show. Apple: A Steve Jobs show. Berkshire: A Warren Buffett show. Renaissance: A James Simons show. Continue with the one man shows of Kolmogorov, von Neumann, Knuth, etc. and in music Heifetz, Rostropovich, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc. It's tough enough to find a Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. Getting him a 'copainter' who would actually help would be impossible. As you add people to a team, the team regresses to the mean where you don't want to be. And, did I mention fights? Sorry 'bout that.
- mmcconnell1618 15y ago
  Bill Gates had Paul Allen, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger. You can argue that one-half of these duos produced more than the other but would they have been able to without the support of the other half?
  - NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
    Allen and Woz both left early on. Allen was in a plane wreck and/or got cancer or some such? Woz was gone before Jobs was at Next, Pixar, or back at Apple. I'm sure Jobs had a mother, also, but as I wrote, and is clearly the case, Apple, that is, the currently successful company, was a one man show from Jobs. While Munger is a bright guy, my reading is as I wrote it: Berkshire is a Buffett show.
    - 0x12 15y ago
      I think you're missing the point here. How they parted does not matter much. What matters is that without the other they would have never made it to where they got.
      - NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
        You are just flatly refusing to pay any informed attention at all to history or to read what the heck I actually wrote. Take Gates: When Allen was still around, Microsoft was a still a small company IBM was still laughing at. Then Allen left. Gates, it was JUST Gates, went on to build Windows 3, Office, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, IE, Windows Server, SQL Server, Windows XP, and more. Gates grew his fortune from a few hundred million dollars to $50 billion or so. That growth was due to Gates. Period. And that was the significant growth that blew the doors off IBM, Sun, HP, Lotus, etc. Got it now? For Jobs, you are really working to be brain-dead: What Woz and Jobs did with the Apple II, etc. is nearly irrelevant to what Jobs did at Next, Pixar, and after his return to Apple. Apple became for a while the most valuable company in the world due to what Jobs did, Jobs, JUST Jobs, with Woz watching from the nickel seats. Sculley? Amelio? They just helped show how bright Jobs was. For your "would have never made it to where they got", we have no way to know that. You are illustrating a huge point that I did make: People like to fight. Even over something really obvious, people like to fight. If you and I were cofounders, then no matter what I did and no matter what success the company was having, you'd be fighting me every way you could think of, fighting, fighting, fighting, for no good reason except you just want to be fighting. There's no way you could be effective.
NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
Once again: Drew came to PG with a lot of good work done. As is common in VC, at least for funding from YC, PG said that Drew needed a 'cofounder'. PG in his http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html gives 18 reasons a startup might fail with the first reason "Single Founder". Moreover, a 'single founder' is frowned on elsewhere in VC. So, we have claims that projects with single founders are somehow inferior, to be frowned upon, to be avoided, not to be funded, etc. On these claims I call BS. Instead, given a project, typically much more information is available for evaluation so that with that extra information 'single founder' should commonly be from a strong advantage to nearly neutral to a strong disadvantage. Net, by itself, 'single founder' says next to nothing important. So, I claim that automatically saying there is something seriously wrong with a single founder project is BS. There are some dangers in having a cofounder: Likely the most important danger is that cofounders can get into fights. Another danger, broadly, is the one the US Navy recognizes: On a ship, there is exactly one Captain. So, in particular, the ship doesn't continue without good direction while 'co-captains' argue about the direction. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 0x12 says "The upside (and it's a huge upside) - you don't have to deal with your co-founders" I agree. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 staunch asked "What if Arash had turned out to be a bad match? They didn't know each other, so it was a pretty big gamble." I agree. PG answered stauch with in part: "Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common." So here PG recognizes "a big risk". So, it is widely recognized that having a cofounder is risky. For the "mitigated", I can't take that very seriously. Instead, For Drew to take on a cofounder so quickly was still risky. Let's examine this issue of risk in more detail: Why accept the risk? One claimed reason for accepting the risk is that a single founder may lack 'psychological stability and self-discipline' and, thus, go wacko, make bad decisions, get discouraged, give up on the company, go for fast women, slow horses, cheap booze, and suffer "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to". He might. Yet he might not. So, in short, such reasons are claiming that a person working nearly alone essentially under just their own direction and motivation with their own ideas is likely doomed. Let's examine this claim; is a person working alone essentially doomed from various 'psychological' issues? First, let's consider the case of nearly anyone who, during the years they are working, is by a wide margin the best in the world at what they are doing. So, by being so good in their work, they really can't have a 'partner' or 'coworker' to share the crucial parts of the work. That is, being the best in the world is not a pairs competition, partnership, joint work, group activity, or team sport. Or, as is often said, "It's lonely at the top.". So people who are the best in the world at what they do are essentially necessarily working alone but are definitely not "doomed". Second, for some examples, consider some world famous people in the arts, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Also in musical performance consider Heifetz, Rostropovich, Horowitz. And in the sciences consider Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. In each case, they worked essentially alone. E.g., consider Bach and compare his music with that of any of his children; the children were hardly up to copying Dad's manuscripts. These people were working essentially alone but definitely were not "doomed". Are there any successful startups by a single founder? Sure: FedEx. While I don't know the fine details of the early days at Oracle, a guess is that Ellison was a sole founder there. Viterbi may have been a sole founder at QUALCOMM. We certainly have to count Dell. HotMail? Lotus? So, these sole founders in business were not doomed. But there are millions more: Just pick a Main Street anywhere in the US, border to border. There will find millions of successful entrepreneurs running 'sole proprietorships' and doing all the important work themselves. Will find such people running restaurants, big truck-little truck operations, gas stations, auto body shops, auto repair shops, doing kitchen renovation, dentistry, tax accounting, family law, various trades, and more. Then outside of town, look at farmers growing fruits, vegetables, grains, raising poultry, dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, etc. These people usually are not in high margin, high growth, high potential businesses, but they are often 'sole proprietors' and are certainly not doomed. For more, in business, is a coworker important or can one guy hope really to do the work essentially alone? I suggest considering Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. Did they do IT startups always alone? No. But in the world class work they did, and/or are doing, they did it alone or nearly so. So, working without a coworker is not doomed. For the more narrow activity of IT startups, especially for Web 2.0, can a sole founder really do all the crucial work himself or is he doomed? I claim that now he can expect to do all the crucial work and, indeed, has one heck of an advantage over a 'team'. For the advantage, he won't get into fights with a cofounder, won't have his best work diluted by compromising with a cofounder, and won't have to spend the time convincing, communicating with, or coordinating with a cofounder. For being able to get the work done, there have been some revolutions in the foundation 'resources' of IT from Moore's law, the similar law for disk space, optical fibers for digital communications, and infrastructure software, say, based on Linux or Windows. So, the founder can be the chief programmer on his 'chief programmer team' and also the whole team except for, say, some occasional very focused technical support from Internet fora, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The CEO of a startup really should know all the work of his company like the back of his hand; basically the way for him to do this is just to do the work himself. When should a VC set aside a project from a single founder? (1) The founder should have some good work to show and, otherwise, a VC should 'set aside'. (2) The founder should appear to be able to get the rest of the work done through a company big enough really to need to hire. So, the founder should be able to (a) give a good pitch to the VCs, (b) show the good work to date, (c) have solid plans for the next steps, (d) clearly be able to work with his lawyer, bookkeeper, tax accountant, recruiting firm, office landlord, and paying customers, and (e) manage at least a few people before it is time to get him, say, a COO. (3) The founder should not have any obvious disqualifications. If these criteria (1)-(3) are met, then a sole founder stands to be a better bet than a 'team'.
NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
Drew came to PG with a lot of good work done. As is common in VC, at least for funding from YC, PG said that Drew needed a 'cofounder'. PG in his http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html gives 18 reasons a startup might fail with the first reason "Single Founder". Moreover, a 'single founder' is frowned on elsewhere in VC. So, we have claims that projects with single founders are somehow inferior, to be frowned upon, to be avoided, not to be funded, etc. On these claims I call BS. Instead, given a project, typically much more information is available for evaluation so that with that extra information 'single founder' should commonly be from a strong advantage to nearly neutral to a strong disadvantage. Net, by itself, 'single founder' says next to nothing important. So, I claim that automatically saying there is something seriously wrong with a single founder project is BS. There are some dangers in having a cofounder: Likely the most important danger is that cofounders can get into fights. Another danger, broadly, is the one the US Navy recognizes: On a ship, there is exactly one Captain. So, in particular, the ship doesn't continue without good direction while 'co-captains' argue about the direction. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 0x12 says "The upside (and it's a huge upside) - you don't have to deal with your co-founders" I agree. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 staunch asked "What if Arash had turned out to be a bad match? They didn't know each other, so it was a pretty big gamble." I agree. PG answered stauch with in part: "Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common." So here PG recognizes "a big risk". So, it is widely recognized that having a cofounder is risky. For the "mitigated", I can't take that very seriously. Instead, For Drew to take on a cofounder so quickly was still risky. Let's examine this issue of risk in more detail: Why accept the risk? One claimed reason for accepting the risk is that a single founder may lack 'psychological stability and self-discipline' and, thus, go wacko, make bad decisions, get discouraged, give up on the company, go for fast women, slow horses, cheap booze, and suffer "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to". He might. Yet he might not. So, in short, such reasons are claiming that a person working nearly alone essentially under just their own direction and motivation with their own ideas is likely doomed. Let's examine this claim; is a person working alone essentially doomed from various 'psychological' issues? First, let's consider the case of nearly anyone who, during the years they are working, is by a wide margin the best in the world at what they are doing. So, by being so good in their work, they really can't have a 'partner' or 'coworker' to share the crucial parts of the work. That is, being the best in the world is not a pairs competition, partnership, joint work, group activity, or team sport. Or, as is often said, "It's lonely at the top.". So people who are the best in the world at what they do are essentially necessarily working alone but are definitely not "doomed". Second, for some examples, consider some world famous people in the arts, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Also in musical performance consider Heifetz, Rostropovich, Horowitz. And in the sciences consider Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. In each case, they worked essentially alone. E.g., consider Bach and compare his music with that of any of his children; the children were hardly up to copying Dad's manuscripts. These people were working essentially alone but definitely were not "doomed". Are there any successful startups by a single founder? Sure: FedEx. While I don't know the fine details of the early days at Oracle, a guess is that Ellison was a sole founder there. Viterbi may have been a sole founder at QUALCOMM. We certainly have to count Dell. HotMail? Lotus? So, these sole founders in business were not doomed. But there are millions more: Just pick a Main Street anywhere in the US, border to border. There will find millions of successful entrepreneurs running 'sole proprietorships' and doing all the important work themselves. Will find such people running restaurants, big truck-little truck operations, gas stations, auto body shops, auto repair shops, doing kitchen renovation, dentistry, tax accounting, family law, various trades, and more. Then outside of town, look at farmers growing fruits, vegetables, grains, raising poultry, dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, etc. These people usually are not in high margin, high growth, high potential businesses, but they are often 'sole proprietors' and are certainly not doomed. For more, in business, is a coworker important or can one guy hope really to do the work essentially alone? I suggest considering Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. Did they do IT startups always alone? No. But in the world class work they did, and/or are doing, they did it alone or nearly so. So, working without a coworker is not doomed. For the more narrow activity of IT startups, especially for Web 2.0, can a sole founder really do all the crucial work himself or is he doomed? I claim that now he can expect to do all the crucial work and, indeed, has one heck of an advantage over a 'team'. For the advantage, he won't get into fights with a cofounder, won't have his best work diluted by compromising with a cofounder, and won't have to spend the time convincing, communicating with, or coordinating with a cofounder. For being able to get the work done, there have been some revolutions in the foundation 'resources' of IT from Moore's law, the similar law for disk space, optical fibers for digital communications, and infrastructure software, say, based on Linux or Windows. So, the founder can be the chief programmer on his 'chief programmer team' and also the whole team except for, say, some occasional very focused technical support from Internet fora, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The CEO of a startup really should know all the work of his company like the back of his hand; basically the way for him to do this is just to do the work himself. When should a VC set aside a project from a single founder? (1) The founder should have some good work to show and, otherwise, a VC should 'set aside'. (2) The founder should appear to be able to get the rest of the work done through a company big enough really to need to hire. So, the founder should be able to (a) give a good pitch to the VCs, (b) show the good work to date, (c) have solid plans for the next steps, (d) clearly be able to work with his lawyer, bookkeeper, tax accountant, recruiting firm, office landlord, and paying customers, and (e) manage at least a few people before it is time to get him, say, a COO. (3) The founder should not have any obvious disqualifications. If these criteria (1)-(3) are met, then a sole founder stands to be a better bet than a 'team'.
NY_USA_Hacker 15y ago
Drew came to PG with a lot of good work done. As is common in VC, at least for funding from YC, PG said that Drew needed a 'cofounder'. PG in his http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html gives 18 reasons a startup might fail with the first reason "Single Founder". Moreover, a 'single founder' is frowned on elsewhere in VC. So, we have claims that projects with single founders are somehow inferior, to be frowned upon, to be avoided, not to be funded, etc. On these claims I call BS. Instead, given a project, typically much more information is available for evaluation so that with that extra information 'single founder' should commonly be from a strong advantage to nearly neutral to a strong disadvantage. Net, by itself, 'single founder' says next to nothing important. So, I claim that automatically saying there is something seriously wrong with a single founder project is BS. There are some dangers in having a cofounder: Likely the most important danger is that cofounders can get into fights. Another danger, broadly, is the one the US Navy recognizes: On a ship, there is exactly one Captain. So, in particular, the ship doesn't continue without good direction while 'co-captains' argue about the direction. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 0x12 says "The upside (and it's a huge upside) - you don't have to deal with your co-founders" I agree. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 staunch asked "What if Arash had turned out to be a bad match? They didn't know each other, so it was a pretty big gamble." I agree. PG answered stauch with in part: "Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common." So here PG recognizes "a big risk". So, it is widely recognized that having a cofounder is risky. For the "mitigated", I can't take that very seriously. Instead, For Drew to take on a cofounder so quickly was still risky. Let's examine this issue of risk in more detail: Why accept the risk? One claimed reason for accepting the risk is that a single founder may lack 'psychological stability and self-discipline' and, thus, go wacko, make bad decisions, get discouraged, give up on the company, go for fast women, slow horses, cheap booze, and suffer "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to". He might. Yet he might not. So, in short, such reasons are claiming that a person working nearly alone essentially under just their own direction and motivation with their own ideas is likely doomed. Let's examine this claim; is a person working alone essentially doomed from various 'psychological' issues? First, let's consider the case of nearly anyone who, during the years they are working, is by a wide margin the best in the world at what they are doing. So, by being so good in their work, they really can't have a 'partner' or 'coworker' to share the crucial parts of the work. That is, being the best in the world is not a pairs competition, partnership, joint work, group activity, or team sport. Or, as is often said, "It's lonely at the top.". So people who are the best in the world at what they do are essentially necessarily working alone but are definitely not "doomed". Second, for some examples, consider some world famous people in the arts, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Also in musical performance consider Heifetz, Rostropovich, Horowitz. And in the sciences consider Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. In each case, they worked essentially alone. E.g., consider Bach and compare his music with that of any of his children; the children were hardly up to copying Dad's manuscripts. These people were working essentially alone but definitely were not "doomed". Are there any successful startups by a single founder? Sure: FedEx. While I don't know the fine details of the early days at Oracle, a guess is that Ellison was a sole founder there. Viterbi may have been a sole founder at QUALCOMM. We certainly have to count Dell. HotMail? Lotus? So, these sole founders in business were not doomed. But there are millions more: Just pick a Main Street anywhere in the US, border to border. There will find millions of successful entrepreneurs running 'sole proprietorships' and doing all the important work themselves. Will find such people running restaurants, big truck-little truck operations, gas stations, auto body shops, auto repair shops, doing kitchen renovation, dentistry, tax accounting, family law, various trades, and more. Then outside of town, look at farmers growing fruits, vegetables, grains, raising poultry, dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, etc. These people usually are not in high margin, high growth, high potential businesses, but they are often 'sole proprietors' and are certainly not doomed. For more, in business, is a coworker important or can one guy hope really to do the work essentially alone? I suggest considering Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. Did they do IT startups always alone? No. But in the world class work they did, and/or are doing, they did it alone or nearly so. So, working without a coworker is not doomed. For the more narrow activity of IT startups, especially for Web 2.0, can a sole founder really do all the crucial work himself or is he doomed? I claim that now he can expect to do all the crucial work and, indeed, has one heck of an advantage over a 'team'. For the advantage, he won't get into fights with a cofounder, won't have his best work diluted by compromising with a cofounder, and won't have to spend the time convincing, communicating with, or coordinating with a cofounder. For being able to get the work done, there have been some revolutions in the foundation 'resources' of IT from Moore's law, the similar law for disk space, optical fibers for digital communications, and infrastructure software, say, based on Linux or Windows. So, the founder can be the chief programmer on his 'chief programmer team' and also the whole team except for, say, some occasional very focused technical support from Internet fora, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The CEO of a startup really should know all the work of his company like the back of his hand; basically the way for him to do this is just to do the work himself. When should a VC set aside a project from a single founder? (1) The founder should have some good work to show and, otherwise, a VC should 'set aside'. (2) The founder should appear to be able to get the rest of the work done through a company big enough really to need to hire. So, the founder should be able to (a) give a good pitch to the VCs, (b) show the good work to date, (c) have solid plans for the next steps, (d) clearly be able to work with his lawyer, bookkeeper, tax accountant, recruiting firm, office landlord, and paying customers, and (e) manage at least a few people before it is time to get him, say, a COO. (3) The founder should not have any obvious disqualifications. If these criteria (1)-(3) are met, then a sole founder stands to be a better bet than a 'team'.

by pg 15y ago

NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago

Even if the roulette ball drops into the slot 00, the play was still a "big risk", and so was, under the circumstances, insisting on a cofounder. That is, given how much Drew had already done, a cofounder had to be mostly just downside risk. The 'mitigation' had to be minimal. Or, Drew's left hand doesn't fight with his right hand, but cofounders can easily fight. If a cofounder is really needed, then so be it. But a cofounder is always risky, and a single founder who has already done well starting the business has a big advantage just because his left hand won't fight with his right hand. Now a single founder can do much more than in past years, even just five years ago. And here's a big point: always in a startup very much want the CEO to 'understand his business'. In an IT software startup, that includes understanding the software. But software has now changed: E.g., with .NET, nearly everything needed in commercial computing, and a larger fraction of Web site construction, is already in the .NET classes. So, the work is just writing a little 'glue' code between the uses of the classes. So, the coding goes VERY quickly. But what doesn't go quickly is understanding the classes because need about 10 books each of 500-1000 pages and, even for just a Web site, about 3000 Web pages of documentation from MSDN. And, this understanding of .NET is just 'overhead' that have to pay just once per programming task solved with a .NET class actually understand well. So, to 'know his business', a CEO needs to know the relevant parts of, say, .NET. A cofounder can't help here. And once the CEO does have that .NET knowledge, there can be some serious question if a cofounder can add much. Just what the Linux world has in place of .NET I don't know, but it can't be both small and effective. There is other evidence: Look up and down Main Street at the successful businesses that have been started there. Typically there's only one person who is the real 'founder'. Look at research: Bright ideas come first to just one person at a time. Period. Microsoft: A Bill Gates show. Apple: A Steve Jobs show. Berkshire: A Warren Buffett show. Renaissance: A James Simons show. Continue with the one man shows of Kolmogorov, von Neumann, Knuth, etc. and in music Heifetz, Rostropovich, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc. It's tough enough to find a Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. Getting him a 'copainter' who would actually help would be impossible. As you add people to a team, the team regresses to the mean where you don't want to be. And, did I mention fights? Sorry 'bout that.

mmcconnell1618 15y ago
Bill Gates had Paul Allen, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger. You can argue that one-half of these duos produced more than the other but would they have been able to without the support of the other half?
- NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
  Allen and Woz both left early on. Allen was in a plane wreck and/or got cancer or some such? Woz was gone before Jobs was at Next, Pixar, or back at Apple. I'm sure Jobs had a mother, also, but as I wrote, and is clearly the case, Apple, that is, the currently successful company, was a one man show from Jobs. While Munger is a bright guy, my reading is as I wrote it: Berkshire is a Buffett show.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    I think you're missing the point here. How they parted does not matter much. What matters is that without the other they would have never made it to where they got.
    - NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
      You are just flatly refusing to pay any informed attention at all to history or to read what the heck I actually wrote. Take Gates: When Allen was still around, Microsoft was a still a small company IBM was still laughing at. Then Allen left. Gates, it was JUST Gates, went on to build Windows 3, Office, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, IE, Windows Server, SQL Server, Windows XP, and more. Gates grew his fortune from a few hundred million dollars to $50 billion or so. That growth was due to Gates. Period. And that was the significant growth that blew the doors off IBM, Sun, HP, Lotus, etc. Got it now? For Jobs, you are really working to be brain-dead: What Woz and Jobs did with the Apple II, etc. is nearly irrelevant to what Jobs did at Next, Pixar, and after his return to Apple. Apple became for a while the most valuable company in the world due to what Jobs did, Jobs, JUST Jobs, with Woz watching from the nickel seats. Sculley? Amelio? They just helped show how bright Jobs was. For your "would have never made it to where they got", we have no way to know that. You are illustrating a huge point that I did make: People like to fight. Even over something really obvious, people like to fight. If you and I were cofounders, then no matter what I did and no matter what success the company was having, you'd be fighting me every way you could think of, fighting, fighting, fighting, for no good reason except you just want to be fighting. There's no way you could be effective.

NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago

Once again: Drew came to PG with a lot of good work done. As is common in VC, at least for funding from YC, PG said that Drew needed a 'cofounder'. PG in his http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html gives 18 reasons a startup might fail with the first reason "Single Founder". Moreover, a 'single founder' is frowned on elsewhere in VC. So, we have claims that projects with single founders are somehow inferior, to be frowned upon, to be avoided, not to be funded, etc. On these claims I call BS. Instead, given a project, typically much more information is available for evaluation so that with that extra information 'single founder' should commonly be from a strong advantage to nearly neutral to a strong disadvantage. Net, by itself, 'single founder' says next to nothing important. So, I claim that automatically saying there is something seriously wrong with a single founder project is BS. There are some dangers in having a cofounder: Likely the most important danger is that cofounders can get into fights. Another danger, broadly, is the one the US Navy recognizes: On a ship, there is exactly one Captain. So, in particular, the ship doesn't continue without good direction while 'co-captains' argue about the direction. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 0x12 says "The upside (and it's a huge upside) - you don't have to deal with your co-founders" I agree. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 staunch asked "What if Arash had turned out to be a bad match? They didn't know each other, so it was a pretty big gamble." I agree. PG answered stauch with in part: "Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common." So here PG recognizes "a big risk". So, it is widely recognized that having a cofounder is risky. For the "mitigated", I can't take that very seriously. Instead, For Drew to take on a cofounder so quickly was still risky. Let's examine this issue of risk in more detail: Why accept the risk? One claimed reason for accepting the risk is that a single founder may lack 'psychological stability and self-discipline' and, thus, go wacko, make bad decisions, get discouraged, give up on the company, go for fast women, slow horses, cheap booze, and suffer "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to". He might. Yet he might not. So, in short, such reasons are claiming that a person working nearly alone essentially under just their own direction and motivation with their own ideas is likely doomed. Let's examine this claim; is a person working alone essentially doomed from various 'psychological' issues? First, let's consider the case of nearly anyone who, during the years they are working, is by a wide margin the best in the world at what they are doing. So, by being so good in their work, they really can't have a 'partner' or 'coworker' to share the crucial parts of the work. That is, being the best in the world is not a pairs competition, partnership, joint work, group activity, or team sport. Or, as is often said, "It's lonely at the top.". So people who are the best in the world at what they do are essentially necessarily working alone but are definitely not "doomed". Second, for some examples, consider some world famous people in the arts, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Also in musical performance consider Heifetz, Rostropovich, Horowitz. And in the sciences consider Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. In each case, they worked essentially alone. E.g., consider Bach and compare his music with that of any of his children; the children were hardly up to copying Dad's manuscripts. These people were working essentially alone but definitely were not "doomed". Are there any successful startups by a single founder? Sure: FedEx. While I don't know the fine details of the early days at Oracle, a guess is that Ellison was a sole founder there. Viterbi may have been a sole founder at QUALCOMM. We certainly have to count Dell. HotMail? Lotus? So, these sole founders in business were not doomed. But there are millions more: Just pick a Main Street anywhere in the US, border to border. There will find millions of successful entrepreneurs running 'sole proprietorships' and doing all the important work themselves. Will find such people running restaurants, big truck-little truck operations, gas stations, auto body shops, auto repair shops, doing kitchen renovation, dentistry, tax accounting, family law, various trades, and more. Then outside of town, look at farmers growing fruits, vegetables, grains, raising poultry, dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, etc. These people usually are not in high margin, high growth, high potential businesses, but they are often 'sole proprietors' and are certainly not doomed. For more, in business, is a coworker important or can one guy hope really to do the work essentially alone? I suggest considering Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. Did they do IT startups always alone? No. But in the world class work they did, and/or are doing, they did it alone or nearly so. So, working without a coworker is not doomed. For the more narrow activity of IT startups, especially for Web 2.0, can a sole founder really do all the crucial work himself or is he doomed? I claim that now he can expect to do all the crucial work and, indeed, has one heck of an advantage over a 'team'. For the advantage, he won't get into fights with a cofounder, won't have his best work diluted by compromising with a cofounder, and won't have to spend the time convincing, communicating with, or coordinating with a cofounder. For being able to get the work done, there have been some revolutions in the foundation 'resources' of IT from Moore's law, the similar law for disk space, optical fibers for digital communications, and infrastructure software, say, based on Linux or Windows. So, the founder can be the chief programmer on his 'chief programmer team' and also the whole team except for, say, some occasional very focused technical support from Internet fora, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The CEO of a startup really should know all the work of his company like the back of his hand; basically the way for him to do this is just to do the work himself. When should a VC set aside a project from a single founder? (1) The founder should have some good work to show and, otherwise, a VC should 'set aside'. (2) The founder should appear to be able to get the rest of the work done through a company big enough really to need to hire. So, the founder should be able to (a) give a good pitch to the VCs, (b) show the good work to date, (c) have solid plans for the next steps, (d) clearly be able to work with his lawyer, bookkeeper, tax accountant, recruiting firm, office landlord, and paying customers, and (e) manage at least a few people before it is time to get him, say, a COO. (3) The founder should not have any obvious disqualifications. If these criteria (1)-(3) are met, then a sole founder stands to be a better bet than a 'team'.

NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago

Drew came to PG with a lot of good work done. As is common in VC, at least for funding from YC, PG said that Drew needed a 'cofounder'. PG in his http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html gives 18 reasons a startup might fail with the first reason "Single Founder". Moreover, a 'single founder' is frowned on elsewhere in VC. So, we have claims that projects with single founders are somehow inferior, to be frowned upon, to be avoided, not to be funded, etc. On these claims I call BS. Instead, given a project, typically much more information is available for evaluation so that with that extra information 'single founder' should commonly be from a strong advantage to nearly neutral to a strong disadvantage. Net, by itself, 'single founder' says next to nothing important. So, I claim that automatically saying there is something seriously wrong with a single founder project is BS. There are some dangers in having a cofounder: Likely the most important danger is that cofounders can get into fights. Another danger, broadly, is the one the US Navy recognizes: On a ship, there is exactly one Captain. So, in particular, the ship doesn't continue without good direction while 'co-captains' argue about the direction. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129873 0x12 says "The upside (and it's a huge upside) - you don't have to deal with your co-founders" I agree. In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128876 staunch asked "What if Arash had turned out to be a bad match? They didn't know each other, so it was a pretty big gamble." I agree. PG answered stauch with in part: "Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common." So here PG recognizes "a big risk". So, it is widely recognized that having a cofounder is risky. For the "mitigated", I can't take that very seriously. Instead, For Drew to take on a cofounder so quickly was still risky. Let's examine this issue of risk in more detail: Why accept the risk? One claimed reason for accepting the risk is that a single founder may lack 'psychological stability and self-discipline' and, thus, go wacko, make bad decisions, get discouraged, give up on the company, go for fast women, slow horses, cheap booze, and suffer "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to". He might. Yet he might not. So, in short, such reasons are claiming that a person working nearly alone essentially under just their own direction and motivation with their own ideas is likely doomed. Let's examine this claim; is a person working alone essentially doomed from various 'psychological' issues? First, let's consider the case of nearly anyone who, during the years they are working, is by a wide margin the best in the world at what they are doing. So, by being so good in their work, they really can't have a 'partner' or 'coworker' to share the crucial parts of the work. That is, being the best in the world is not a pairs competition, partnership, joint work, group activity, or team sport. Or, as is often said, "It's lonely at the top.". So people who are the best in the world at what they do are essentially necessarily working alone but are definitely not "doomed". Second, for some examples, consider some world famous people in the arts, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Also in musical performance consider Heifetz, Rostropovich, Horowitz. And in the sciences consider Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. In each case, they worked essentially alone. E.g., consider Bach and compare his music with that of any of his children; the children were hardly up to copying Dad's manuscripts. These people were working essentially alone but definitely were not "doomed". Are there any successful startups by a single founder? Sure: FedEx. While I don't know the fine details of the early days at Oracle, a guess is that Ellison was a sole founder there. Viterbi may have been a sole founder at QUALCOMM. We certainly have to count Dell. HotMail? Lotus? So, these sole founders in business were not doomed. But there are millions more: Just pick a Main Street anywhere in the US, border to border. There will find millions of successful entrepreneurs running 'sole proprietorships' and doing all the important work themselves. Will find such people running restaurants, big truck-little truck operations, gas stations, auto body shops, auto repair shops, doing kitchen renovation, dentistry, tax accounting, family law, various trades, and more. Then outside of town, look at farmers growing fruits, vegetables, grains, raising poultry, dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, etc. These people usually are not in high margin, high growth, high potential businesses, but they are often 'sole proprietors' and are certainly not doomed. For more, in business, is a coworker important or can one guy hope really to do the work essentially alone? I suggest considering Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. Did they do IT startups always alone? No. But in the world class work they did, and/or are doing, they did it alone or nearly so. So, working without a coworker is not doomed. For the more narrow activity of IT startups, especially for Web 2.0, can a sole founder really do all the crucial work himself or is he doomed? I claim that now he can expect to do all the crucial work and, indeed, has one heck of an advantage over a 'team'. For the advantage, he won't get into fights with a cofounder, won't have his best work diluted by compromising with a cofounder, and won't have to spend the time convincing, communicating with, or coordinating with a cofounder. For being able to get the work done, there have been some revolutions in the foundation 'resources' of IT from Moore's law, the similar law for disk space, optical fibers for digital communications, and infrastructure software, say, based on Linux or Windows. So, the founder can be the chief programmer on his 'chief programmer team' and also the whole team except for, say, some occasional very focused technical support from Internet fora, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The CEO of a startup really should know all the work of his company like the back of his hand; basically the way for him to do this is just to do the work himself. When should a VC set aside a project from a single founder? (1) The founder should have some good work to show and, otherwise, a VC should 'set aside'. (2) The founder should appear to be able to get the rest of the work done through a company big enough really to need to hire. So, the founder should be able to (a) give a good pitch to the VCs, (b) show the good work to date, (c) have solid plans for the next steps, (d) clearly be able to work with his lawyer, bookkeeper, tax accountant, recruiting firm, office landlord, and paying customers, and (e) manage at least a few people before it is time to get him, say, a COO. (3) The founder should not have any obvious disqualifications. If these criteria (1)-(3) are met, then a sole founder stands to be a better bet than a 'team'.

NY_USA_Hacker 15y ago