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Everything is relative, isn't it? Most people would live a very good life as the solo driver of a business that did two or three million a year. As an investo

Everything is relative, isn't it? Most people would live a very good life as the solo driver of a business that did two or three million a year. As an investor these businesses are probably of no real interest to you unless they can be taken way past this revenue level. And that's OK. I think you realize that tons of people would be very happy if they could pay off their home, cars, etc., have one or two very nice vacations a year, pay for their kid's every needs and their college education and maintain a very nice lifestyle during retirement. That being the context, I've seen tons of solo-founder businesses do very well and come up to that cruising altitude with hard work and dedication. And that's OK. Also, the OP's point on young-inexperienced solo founders vs. older experienced founders resonates with me. All I've done is solo and self-funded. I've made a ton of mistakes. I've made a ton of money and lost a lot of it. If I were in your shoes I would not, in a million years, hand the keys of a startup to a young just-out-of-college kid. Business can be brutal. It is very, very easy to become your own worst enemy. If you have a small team motivated to succeed because they each own a piece of the thing they are building they'll probably help each other stay on point and get it done. Of course, they also need extensive external coaching, support, guidance, etc. How many of your startups would have succeeded if the infrastructure you provide (beyond just the initial small funding amount) did not exist? My prediction is that most of these teams of young founders would crumble under the pressure of doing a business without the team that you put into place to make it happen. Example: I have a friend who started a very successful courier company. He now employs north of a hundred drivers. No formal education. High-school drop out. Makes loads of money. For nearly a whole year he lived, ate and slept in his car as he service this one mid-size client who gave him a shot making deliveries. He literally slept in his car in the parking lot outside of their offices and workers would come wake him up when a delivery had to be made. No support system, no coaching, no, well, nothing. I don't know many people who would be willing to endure such torture. My very first startup. Self-funded it with $250K I made after a heavy couple of years of consulting work. My own money on the table. Had my first kid. My wife didn't work. I then spent a year and a half in the garage working 18 hour days --seven days a week-- writing code, designing electronics and everything else needed to get my first product done. It was not fun, but it was a lot of fun. Weird statement, I know. Again, I don't know many people willing to do something like that. I am not saying that all solo founders engage in heroic acts of self-sacrifice to bring their ventures to flight altitude. But I do think that it isn't quite fair to characterize the solo-founder equation as a formula for failure when the vantage point from which this conclusion is reached is one where there's a huge enterprise and ecosystem behind the startups to provide funding, coaching, guidance and all that might be required in order to succeed. Take all of that away and maybe we can compare apples to apples.

pg 14y ago
I would love to believe that we're as critical to the success of the companies we fund as you suggest. That would be great. But if I have biased data because it comes from observing companies supported by a powerful YC crutch, wouldn't my bias cause me to underestimate the dangers of weaknesses like being a single founder rather than overestimate them?
- jhartmann 14y ago
  Perhaps, perhaps not. I think it is hard to make generalization given that YC and Techstars have not funded many solo founders. I think going solo is multiple times as hard, but sometimes that increased burn motivates people in strange ways. It also is a hell of a lot cheaper if the person is experienced to only have one, this can increase the runway much farther. One of the problems I see with YC and Techstars both is that well experienced people with mortgages and kids are at a huge disadvantage due to their inability to take as little as a group of kids right out of college. Perhaps well experienced solo founders are a different animal, it would be an interesting experiment to try and get a larger data set to see exactly which way it would go.
  - rdl 14y ago
    YC has funded >300 startups, so I think it's funded a lot more solo founders than any individual solo founder has started plausible businesses (Mr. "I'm working on 42 other businesses!" Way aside...)
- jdunck 14y ago
  Playing devil's advocate here, there's another reason: Rule #1 of startups is: don't die. In reliability planning, 2 is 1 and 1 is none. A single founder is a SPoF. They get cancer, get an unsupportive SO, get a needy family member, lose a rich uncle, etc., they kill the company. Having 2+ founders guards against these likelihoods (over the course of the company).
  - erichocean 14y ago
    Founders aren't fungible. It's not like you have one "founder", and then to increase the odds of success, you add a few more for redundancy. In any "high growth" business, which is the topic of discussion, if the founder is worth anything, then the likelihood of finding another founder who is a drop-in replacement in the event they "get cancer, get an unsupportive SO, get a needy family member, lose a rich uncle, etc." is effectively zero. The entire reason the company has high growth potential is because of that specific founder. Replace them, and everything changes. ----- The real problem is that we are confusing a "founder" with an early employee, possibly including an employee present at the very beginning (i.e. incorporation), and granted equity via some mechanism (options, grants, etc.). A founder and an early employee couldn't be more different. It's rare that two founders (a) happen to be near each other, (b) are working on the same thing, and (c) agree with how to tackle said thing. Founders can't really be "hired" in the conventional sense, and they don't sign on to other people's visions like early employees do. When the miraculous situation described above does occur, yes, you can get two founders in the same company, like what happened at Google. But...it's very rare. Single founder + small teams are the overwhelming norm, not the exception. All of these other "multiple founder" situations that pg likes to boast are so successful are, in fact, single founders + early team, which the single founder recruited. Not the same thing at all, and they don't have any of the SPoF redundancy you conjectured helped them to succeed. The major alternative to single- and the (rare) multi-founder companies are actually teams without any founders -- instead, they have a bunch of coders who like to work together and have developed some interesting tech that has some potential commercial value. That can work too, especially in software/technology, but those kinds of companies only succeed, if they succeed at all, with massive outside help from something like a YC. They are more likely to be found in tech incubators, and are highly over-represented on HN and in discussions like this. I'd argue that tech incubators exist precisely because these founder-less teams exist, and need funding and direction. That's a good area for YC to operate in, but it necessarily skews pg's view of the world.

pg 14y ago

I would love to believe that we're as critical to the success of the companies we fund as you suggest. That would be great. But if I have biased data because it comes from observing companies supported by a powerful YC crutch, wouldn't my bias cause me to underestimate the dangers of weaknesses like being a single founder rather than overestimate them?

jhartmann 14y ago
Perhaps, perhaps not. I think it is hard to make generalization given that YC and Techstars have not funded many solo founders. I think going solo is multiple times as hard, but sometimes that increased burn motivates people in strange ways. It also is a hell of a lot cheaper if the person is experienced to only have one, this can increase the runway much farther. One of the problems I see with YC and Techstars both is that well experienced people with mortgages and kids are at a huge disadvantage due to their inability to take as little as a group of kids right out of college. Perhaps well experienced solo founders are a different animal, it would be an interesting experiment to try and get a larger data set to see exactly which way it would go.
- rdl 14y ago
  YC has funded >300 startups, so I think it's funded a lot more solo founders than any individual solo founder has started plausible businesses (Mr. "I'm working on 42 other businesses!" Way aside...)
jdunck 14y ago
Playing devil's advocate here, there's another reason: Rule #1 of startups is: don't die. In reliability planning, 2 is 1 and 1 is none. A single founder is a SPoF. They get cancer, get an unsupportive SO, get a needy family member, lose a rich uncle, etc., they kill the company. Having 2+ founders guards against these likelihoods (over the course of the company).
- erichocean 14y ago
  Founders aren't fungible. It's not like you have one "founder", and then to increase the odds of success, you add a few more for redundancy. In any "high growth" business, which is the topic of discussion, if the founder is worth anything, then the likelihood of finding another founder who is a drop-in replacement in the event they "get cancer, get an unsupportive SO, get a needy family member, lose a rich uncle, etc." is effectively zero. The entire reason the company has high growth potential is because of that specific founder. Replace them, and everything changes. ----- The real problem is that we are confusing a "founder" with an early employee, possibly including an employee present at the very beginning (i.e. incorporation), and granted equity via some mechanism (options, grants, etc.). A founder and an early employee couldn't be more different. It's rare that two founders (a) happen to be near each other, (b) are working on the same thing, and (c) agree with how to tackle said thing. Founders can't really be "hired" in the conventional sense, and they don't sign on to other people's visions like early employees do. When the miraculous situation described above does occur, yes, you can get two founders in the same company, like what happened at Google. But...it's very rare. Single founder + small teams are the overwhelming norm, not the exception. All of these other "multiple founder" situations that pg likes to boast are so successful are, in fact, single founders + early team, which the single founder recruited. Not the same thing at all, and they don't have any of the SPoF redundancy you conjectured helped them to succeed. The major alternative to single- and the (rare) multi-founder companies are actually teams without any founders -- instead, they have a bunch of coders who like to work together and have developed some interesting tech that has some potential commercial value. That can work too, especially in software/technology, but those kinds of companies only succeed, if they succeed at all, with massive outside help from something like a YC. They are more likely to be found in tech incubators, and are highly over-represented on HN and in discussions like this. I'd argue that tech incubators exist precisely because these founder-less teams exist, and need funding and direction. That's a good area for YC to operate in, but it necessarily skews pg's view of the world.