His position and yours aren't incompatible. He says he wants to "succeed" -- he didn't say he wants to get "really big" anywhere. In your "startup = growth" e

His position and yours aren't incompatible. He says he wants to "succeed" -- he didn't say he wants to get "really big" anywhere. In your "startup = growth" essay you laid it out very clearly. From the investor perspective, the only thing that influences success (returns) in any way is when a company gets "really big". Everything else is noise. But he's just giving a founder perspective. It's not contradictory, and to me it makes sense. I would definitely call what he described in the post "success", i.e. using the proceeds from a previous company to start a profitable new one. You might argue from the data that he could have grown faster with a co-founder. That could be true in aggregate, but there might be some other factor which makes it untrue for certain situations. As he points out, there are also risks involved, i.e. fights between co-founders which I think you pointed out as a huge source of failure. Also, you only really have data from YC companies, which lately are biased towards having multiple founders. edit: I guess the undertone is that people perceive that you've redefined the rules of the game (certainly "startup = growth" does that) and are trying to restore some balance in the dialogue. I think they perceive a misalignment of interests in terms of pushing for extremely high growth whereas you would argue there is none.