Single person profitability sounds great. But I guess it really depends on why you started a company in the first place.
Did you start a company primarily because you didn't want to work for anyone else and really didn't care to work with anyone else?
Or did you start a company because you wanted to work on an idea that would change the landscape of the industry you're entering? Did you do it because you wanted to build something 10s of thousands (if not 100s or millions) of people would use? Did you do it to grow a real company that would have real impact and be worth a decent amount of money?
I think that if you want to do the latter, 9 times out of 10, you need to have more than 1 person. I'd rather be Mark Zuckerberg pre-profitability than random person doing random thing but profitable. That's just me.
If you want to be single-person profitable, you can always just do your own consultancy.
The big problem with consulting is that it takes so much /time/ and when you stop working, the money stops coming in. There is a lot to be said for owning a product business as your primary means of support.
Product companies often allow you to invest capital at a much higher rate of return. (I get several hundred percent return on my hardware purchases)
Product companies also allow you to avoid more of the work you don't like, and to work more on your own schedule. (Personally, I think it's quite a chore to wake up at the same time every day; as a product company, nobody cares.)
Zuckerberg probably could have reached profitability solo before hooking up with Sean Parker. Facebook's success might have taken a little bit longer, but maybe this would have helped him avoid the missteps that now are a blemish on the company's history.
Did you start a company primarily because you didn't want to work for anyone else and really didn't care to work with anyone else?
Or did you start a company because you wanted to work on an idea that would change the landscape of the industry you're entering? Did you do it because you wanted to build something 10s of thousands (if not 100s or millions) of people would use? Did you do it to grow a real company that would have real impact and be worth a decent amount of money?
I think that if you want to do the latter, 9 times out of 10, you need to have more than 1 person. I'd rather be Mark Zuckerberg pre-profitability than random person doing random thing but profitable. That's just me.
If you want to be single-person profitable, you can always just do your own consultancy.