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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

by 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.
  - macspoofing 14y ago
    >In fact, single founders + early team, which the single founder recruited. You're redefining terms. A founder is a founder. For example, you may try to call Wozniak an 'early employee' of Apple Computers and Steve Jobs the founder, but then you'd be playing with words. Both of them are universally acknowledged as founders.
robomartin 14y ago
Please don't get me wrong. I have huge respect and admiration for what you and YC are doing. I wish resources like YC had been available when I was first infected with the entrepreneurial bug. That was a different time. I think, in general terms, it might be interesting to have access to data well outside of YC and similar tech incubators. I wonder what it might look like if we included all manner of businesses, from gas stations to bakeries and, yes, tech? In that case I would suspect that success or failure might correlate to factors other than the number of founders. Now, this is going to sound weird because I will agree with you: In tech the probability of success should increase with more founders (to a limit). I'll qualify this by saying that it has to be the right founders. They can't be clones. They have to bring something different to the table. In my opinion, the same could be achieved --to a point-- with a single founder and really good initial hires. The reason I say this is that a tech startup, particularly today, might have to cover so many disciplines that it is nearly impossible to find all of this in one person. And you probably wouldn't want to, even if you did find this person, at least not for the long haul. So, a good founding team or a good single founder and a solid hired-in team is almost mandatory. My own experience has been, well, maybe "unique" is the word. While my training was in electrical engineering over the years I've had to learn a number of engineering disciplines on my own due to the various directions that life (and my own curiosity) led me through. I became a mechanical engineer, software engineer, embedded engineer, learned FPGA's (they didn't exist when I went to school), learned metal and plastics manufacturing and even became a decent salesman. All the while, when it was possible, I'd find people to replace me in certain functions. Finding good people wasn't the easiest part of my job. This is where finding good teams fresh out of school makes a lot of sense. And this is probably why the success rate falls off quickly as you get farther away from places like Stanford. We probably agree. I think what touches people the wrong way might be that your data seems to be used to create bias against single-founder ventures and this has to some extent permeated the industry. It is probably 100x harder to get funded as a single founder. Perhaps single-founders have to settle for lower levels of funding, lower quality deals and less support (I am not talking about YC here, just a general statement) and, with lower funding comes a far greater probability of failure. In my prior post I mentioned self-funding my first startup to the tune of $250K. What I did not mention is that I was grossly under-funded and just did not know it at the time due to my lack of experience in the segment. This was a hardware/software/manufacturing startup and $250K was nowhere near what I needed. I probably needed two million to do it right. I would end-up having to go and hustle for more money during the first year by consulting and doing projects just to be able to keep going. I burned through that cash very quickly, almost before I left my garage. And it was just me! I never had enough money. It was a real struggle. At some level, the only reason I did not fail was because --cliche alarm-- failure was not really an option. So, yes, I think that for the most part I am in agreement with your position. I have the scars to prove just how tough it can be. It probably would have been far smarter to go find outside money and build a team. I just wasn't wired that way and, frankly, the option wasn't even on my radar.

by pg 14y ago

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.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  >In fact, single founders + early team, which the single founder recruited. You're redefining terms. A founder is a founder. For example, you may try to call Wozniak an 'early employee' of Apple Computers and Steve Jobs the founder, but then you'd be playing with words. Both of them are universally acknowledged as founders.

robomartin 14y ago

Please don't get me wrong. I have huge respect and admiration for what you and YC are doing. I wish resources like YC had been available when I was first infected with the entrepreneurial bug. That was a different time. I think, in general terms, it might be interesting to have access to data well outside of YC and similar tech incubators. I wonder what it might look like if we included all manner of businesses, from gas stations to bakeries and, yes, tech? In that case I would suspect that success or failure might correlate to factors other than the number of founders. Now, this is going to sound weird because I will agree with you: In tech the probability of success should increase with more founders (to a limit). I'll qualify this by saying that it has to be the right founders. They can't be clones. They have to bring something different to the table. In my opinion, the same could be achieved --to a point-- with a single founder and really good initial hires. The reason I say this is that a tech startup, particularly today, might have to cover so many disciplines that it is nearly impossible to find all of this in one person. And you probably wouldn't want to, even if you did find this person, at least not for the long haul. So, a good founding team or a good single founder and a solid hired-in team is almost mandatory. My own experience has been, well, maybe "unique" is the word. While my training was in electrical engineering over the years I've had to learn a number of engineering disciplines on my own due to the various directions that life (and my own curiosity) led me through. I became a mechanical engineer, software engineer, embedded engineer, learned FPGA's (they didn't exist when I went to school), learned metal and plastics manufacturing and even became a decent salesman. All the while, when it was possible, I'd find people to replace me in certain functions. Finding good people wasn't the easiest part of my job. This is where finding good teams fresh out of school makes a lot of sense. And this is probably why the success rate falls off quickly as you get farther away from places like Stanford. We probably agree. I think what touches people the wrong way might be that your data seems to be used to create bias against single-founder ventures and this has to some extent permeated the industry. It is probably 100x harder to get funded as a single founder. Perhaps single-founders have to settle for lower levels of funding, lower quality deals and less support (I am not talking about YC here, just a general statement) and, with lower funding comes a far greater probability of failure. In my prior post I mentioned self-funding my first startup to the tune of $250K. What I did not mention is that I was grossly under-funded and just did not know it at the time due to my lack of experience in the segment. This was a hardware/software/manufacturing startup and $250K was nowhere near what I needed. I probably needed two million to do it right. I would end-up having to go and hustle for more money during the first year by consulting and doing projects just to be able to keep going. I burned through that cash very quickly, almost before I left my garage. And it was just me! I never had enough money. It was a real struggle. At some level, the only reason I did not fail was because --cliche alarm-- failure was not really an option. So, yes, I think that for the most part I am in agreement with your position. I have the scars to prove just how tough it can be. It probably would have been far smarter to go find outside money and build a team. I just wasn't wired that way and, frankly, the option wasn't even on my radar.