> ...doesn't it make more sense to apply alone than find what might be the wrong tech-co-founder? It does, but it doesn't make as much sense as applying with t

> ...doesn't it make more sense to apply alone than find what might be the wrong tech-co-founder? It does, but it doesn't make as much sense as applying with the right co-founder(s). See also e.g. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/615949374317723648 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/615949374317723648 for a recent statement from pg on this. (Aside: holy steaming pile of crap, Twitter search really sucks.) YC is generally looking for really solid teams -- people that know eachother well, get along well, have a history together, hopefully have been through difficult times together. Because a startup can be extraordinarily difficult and the odds of a home-run success will fall quite a lot if cofounders can't weather the challenges. If you happen to be the rare true one-man-team, then by all means, apply anyway. (Or, apply even if you're not sure if you are; what do you have to lose?) But ... maybe YC isn't the right thing for you anyway. There are a lot of different ways to start and run a business, and the startup model has some distinct disadvantages, not least of which is that it's difficult to spend much time away from the startup up until it has grown to its full size. Do you really want to spend the next, say, 10 years of your life dealing almost exclusively with growing a business? Because I get the sense that that's what investors are looking for. Contrast this with a regular plain ol' lifestyle business. You gather a small amount of capital together, put together an early prototype product, find your customers, get the business to start making ends meet, pay off debt, and then go visit a beach somewhere in the world and have a beer and stare at the waves and think about how to grow the business a little bit more so that you can afford to stay at a nicer beach.