What about Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak?
Motivation, more workers, and new ideas are all valuable contributions, but I feel like you might have missed the biggest benefit of all.
Co-founders can be good at the things you, personally, can't do. This is most visible in the business/technical co-founder division, but it can generalize to all kinds of tasks. If you're terrific at engineering large-scale filesystems (or whatever), but you can't build a web interface (or whatever), you might really need a technical co-founder with a different skill set. Every day or so, my co-founder cranks out something that would have taken me a week or more in a few hours.
Don't underestimate the value of teaming up with someone who's as good as you are at different things!
What about Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, or hell, Ray Kroc? No one is saying that it is not advantageous to team up, just that you cannot discount single founder successes.
Didn't Bezos start with a team? I think we need to distinguish between "one-founder" and "one-man" startups.
Speaking as a one-man startup, I think the problem is worse than skills-sets, and worse than the costs of switching between tasks; it's also values - not in terms of ethics, but in terms of where your attention goes. eg. attention to detail vs. big picture; the product vs. the market; the solution vs. the problem. One person definitely can do it all (and it's getting easier) but it's more than twice as hard as having two people.
However, whether it's easier or harder for two people is less important than whether it is easy enough for one particular person to do it.
Great point, thanks for bringing it up. I've had to learn to do lots of different things so I don't always think about this one, but it's certainly a big one. I'm always open to working with someone if they are the right match.
Motivation, more workers, and new ideas are all valuable contributions, but I feel like you might have missed the biggest benefit of all.
Co-founders can be good at the things you, personally, can't do. This is most visible in the business/technical co-founder division, but it can generalize to all kinds of tasks. If you're terrific at engineering large-scale filesystems (or whatever), but you can't build a web interface (or whatever), you might really need a technical co-founder with a different skill set. Every day or so, my co-founder cranks out something that would have taken me a week or more in a few hours.
Don't underestimate the value of teaming up with someone who's as good as you are at different things!