"Well, duh, if you have 3 equal co-founders you personally have just diluted by 66.66% and you haven’t even raised a penny!" This argument is mistaken. If the

"Well, duh, if you have 3 equal co-founders you personally have just diluted by 66.66% and you haven’t even raised a penny!" This argument is mistaken. If the third person can do as much work as each of the first two, they will each have less of a proportionately more valuable company. If the dilution argument were correct, the optimal number of founders would be 1, and that is certainly not true. We find from experience that 2 or 3 founders is optimal. If famous companies more often have 2 founders than 3, it's probably mostly because people who want to start their own companies are rare; obviously clusters of 2 are going to be more common than clusters of 3.