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Ryan has built businesses before Treehouse - ThinkVitamin and Carsonified for example. He knows the people, has the connections, the talent pool to pick from.

Ryan has built businesses before Treehouse - ThinkVitamin and Carsonified for example. He knows the people, has the connections, the talent pool to pick from. PG's YC (using YC since that's the case being used) are tend to be populated with fresh/younger people, who probably never ran a business prior to YC. Not really fair to try and compare the two and draw conclusions that will blanket the other side of the argument. Are you going to succeed right out of college as a single founder with your very first business? Probably not. Would you succeed if you had decade of experience under your belt, built previous successful businesses, know the industry, know the players, and etc? Most likely.

erichocean 14y ago
Agree, with one exception: pg isn't arguing about "success", he's arguing that single founder companies (which he further qualifies to mean "and that have no early employees") will not, statistically speaking, grow into large companies. Of course, pg's stacking the deck by disallowing early employees for solo founders (which he does by claiming that early employees are "founders", and thus, support his multi-founder hypothesis). I do think it's correct to say that companies without employees are rarely very large, but this doesn't seem all that insightful. The more interesting question is why pg disallows solo founders with early employees? The vast majority of large, successful companies actually fall into that camp, and not the multi-founder camp, of which Google is a large, successful example. To pg, a "founder" is apparently an early employee who (a) wants the company to succeed, (b) plays some kind of "important" role (e.g. is not a janitor), and (c) has some skin in the game to benefit from "success". I think that's far too broad, and that we should call them early employees with equity (i.e. what they are), not "founders" (what pg apparently wishes them to be).

erichocean 14y ago

Agree, with one exception: pg isn't arguing about "success", he's arguing that single founder companies (which he further qualifies to mean "and that have no early employees") will not, statistically speaking, grow into large companies. Of course, pg's stacking the deck by disallowing early employees for solo founders (which he does by claiming that early employees are "founders", and thus, support his multi-founder hypothesis). I do think it's correct to say that companies without employees are rarely very large, but this doesn't seem all that insightful. The more interesting question is why pg disallows solo founders with early employees? The vast majority of large, successful companies actually fall into that camp, and not the multi-founder camp, of which Google is a large, successful example. To pg, a "founder" is apparently an early employee who (a) wants the company to succeed, (b) plays some kind of "important" role (e.g. is not a janitor), and (c) has some skin in the game to benefit from "success". I think that's far too broad, and that we should call them early employees with equity (i.e. what they are), not "founders" (what pg apparently wishes them to be).