There is a correlation between startup success and "founding teams" therefore investors often use the existence of a team as a proxy for a higher probability of

There is a correlation between startup success and "founding teams" therefore investors often use the existence of a team as a proxy for a higher probability of success. Teams can have convexity or concavity effects - that is, they have the opportunity to make you a lot more successful or a lot more unsuccessful. Since it's hard to tell the difference between a good team and a bad team there's a lot of room for people to to create inauthentic signals by bundling together impressive-looking people that form bad teams. Therefore the heuristic of "a founding team exists" is easily gamed [0] to the point that it's losing its utility. However, since in a few cases it's exceedingly important to the success of the startup, and because of information asymmetry faced by investors it's one of the only good signals for success. On a generalised individual startup level it was probably always more harmful than it was profitable. In practice ask yourself: Do you feel this person will help your company to succeed or are you just adding them because you've been told that this makes a startup more investable? If it's truly the former then take the risk; otherwise be careful, work hard and increase your exposure to suitable co-founders. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_Law