Most people are in Startup School haven't even started or have no idea. SUS is a perfect place to start on a small project with other people. From our experience at YC, getting a cofounder is the single best thing to improve the odds of your startup.
That could be at the same time true on average and not true for the specific case where the founders don't know each other all that well (and therefore don't trust each other much more than you'd trust a stranger). If you have stats on the latter case, I'd be curious to see them. If not, consider collecting the stats from this experiment.
Maybe people are "good by default" and all that, but I do have some very early stage startup experience (VPEng), and both the founders and the employees have enough trouble trying to not get screwed even without such additional complications. Money and egos always find a way to ruin everything.
I'm with pg on this, starting a company with someone is a bigger commitment than getting married and without the physical chemistry to help things through tough spots. You'd be crazy to do that with someone you just met. I can't help thinking you'd actually be decreasing your odds of success versus just being a single founder. I'll stay a single founder and I feel that's the right decision for me. I can weather the highs and lows. I remain curious to see if the data will back this up more generally.
Long term this could be a good idea to meet people with similar interests, but to partner with for your next startup maybe. Not for now.
> starting a company with someone is a bigger commitment than getting married
How? You can leave a company you founded at any any time without any financial repercussions usually but marriages you cannot unless you get a prenup (which probably costs legal fees) and that's not even including the ring nor wedding.
>>>> starting a company with someone is a bigger commitment than getting married
>> How? You can leave a company you founded at any any time without any financial repercussions
Absolutely not! Leaving a company has huge financial repercussions! If you have no agreement, you are either killing the company (as everyone disbands) or end up with either no ownership or end up with some uncertain amount of ownership as all the owners fight amongst themselves. If you do have a vesting agreement, you've usually lost everything if you haven't reached your 1st year cliff vest.
Either way -- you've lost a lot --
0. You've "lost" all the work you put in (often at zero or low salary). You often put in 80hr workweeks -- at that rate you could have made a boatload of money with a real job or contracting, and instead you put it all in as sweat equity and now the company owns all that unpaid effort, not you.
1. You've lost all the money you may have invested into the company
2. You've lost all the IP you came up with but may now be owned by the company
Also, I'd be worried if the startup means so little that you are willing to walk away without disappointment -- because startups go through hard times and you have to be willing to slog through the despair without quitting.
This is silly. Most startups funded by these VC types are “go big or go home” and “fail fast” types. All this stuff you said about the company failing is an what the VC pushes you to do 9 out of 10 times and move on. The money lost came from various sources including investors who take risks for a living.
How do you say that is worse than kids growing up in a broken home and many lives affected? An entrepeneur can have 5 failures and 8 successful exits. Do you want to say the institution of marriage can be like that?
>You can leave a company you founded at any any time without any financial repercussions
This mentality is the exact wrong one to have, especially if you're "co-founder dating".
Unless you're two people hacking away in a dorm room with no customers, making no money (hardly a "business"), there are all kinds of obligations and financial repercussions you might have.
and when you have children, then a permanent separation is impossible unless one partner gives up seeing the children ever again. you are connected for the rest of your lives
Getting married to someone you just met on a dating app would probably be a bad idea. It could still work. Arranged marriages aren't much different.
Aside from that, there's no issue using a dating app to find that special someone you should marry. Same goes for founder dating. You have to start somewhere.
In any case you should try working with your potential cofounder first. A friend isn't necessarily a good cofounder.
There are always exceptions. It still makes it a bad idea.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with using it to meet like minded people who you might collaborate with one day.
But let's not ignore the fact that single founders can be successful too, and one of the biggest causes of startup failure is co-founder disputes, according to YC's own data. The real question is, will it help more than it hurts? The good news is we may know in a few years with this experiment YC is running.
Agreed that the biggest cause of failure is issues between founders.
One could say then that you should only start a company when you have a cofounder, and one that is good. But in reality there's no way of knowing who will be good.
The best proxy is choosing someone you have worked with before. A coworker for instance.
Simply choosing a founder because you hang out with them is not a good idea.
Try moonlighting with your founder dating buddy before making the leap.
>Entrepreneurs Are Better Off Going It Alone, Study Says
Startups founded by a single person are more likely to survive and succeed than those founded by a team (wsj article on paper by Jason Greenberg)
It's unclear they are remarkably more rare than other types. The data appears to show that single founders are the second most successful arrangement after pairs.
Second most doesn't mean anything when you're talking about three arrangements, realistically.
I would like it to be true that solo founders have just as much chance of success. I have been unable to find a cofounder for years, and I am not biased against solo companies. People are unpredictable, and even wildly successful companies have some disheartening back stories. I've learned that from books like Idea Man (Microsoft) and Masters of Doom (id Software) where founding members got screwed by morally challenged cofounders. In the case of id, Tom Hall received nothing from id in the end, and forfeited all of his equity when he was fired. Because they decided he wasn't needed anymore, despite him being there from the beginning through the tough times.
But it stands to reason that you are better off if you can find someone who is honest and is going to work hard with you, simply because two heads are better than one. When used together at least. Emphasis on honest, I would rank trust and ethics over experience and intelligence.
If you can't find that person, and you are determined, then may as well go ahead and go it alone. You only live once. Just realize the odds are stacked even higher against you. You are only lying to yourself if you refuse to accept that truth.
And you can be a cofounder of a successful company, but still fail miserably and have it all taken away by a bad cofounder.
You just dismissed the data and replaced it with nothing of substance. Forget your feelings and look at the data, single founders are successful especially when you're talking about smaller companies that might not go the VC route. VCs are really only interested in companies that have a shot at being unicorns.
It doesn't tell how many companies with single founders fail vs teams, but it shows that single founder companies comprise about half of successful startups on crunchbase. It's not perfect, but it's hardly bad either.
>It doesn't tell how many companies with single founders fail vs teams
Exactly, that missing information is what makes the data bad. Negative examples are needed to make any meaningful comparison between single vs team. You're missing an entire distribution showing success vs failure. You gave a perfect example of selection bias.
You would make a terrible statistician, or maybe you're highly skilled in the art of How to Lie with Statistics.
Imperfect data is a fact of life. Provided you understand what it represents ("Of startups that succeed, a large proportion have single founders") there is nothing wrong with using this.
It's much better than what you have offered: no data and insults to anyone who disagrees with you. You may want to consider this when thinking about why you have been unable to find a co-founder.
Depends on the scale of success. A successful lifestyle business can be achieved by a solo founder. A unicorn or company with large exit is less likely.
An employee is never going to be as personally invested as a cofounder. But the upside is you can terminate them if your working relationship goes awry.
"Getting married to someone you just met on a dating app would probably be a bad idea"
Nope. It is a great idea.
"According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, the global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6 percent — a significantly low number. Compared to the 55 percent of marriages in the world that are unarranged, this low statistic shows the success rate of arranged marriages"
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but those numbers are extremely misleading. I can tell you from close personal observation that this low divorce rate is almost certainly because divorce is extremely taboo in the kinds of societies that have a lot of arranged marriages. The kind of culture that sees an arranged marriage as OK is also very likely one that judges divorcees harshly. See also: the Hasan Minhaj bit about the "What will people say?" attitude in South Asian cultures.
Also, the super low divorce rate should make you suspicious -- it would be more believable if it was slightly lower (like 30% or whatever), but 6%? There's clearly something else going on, and if you look closely you'll realize why.
On the other hand, arranged marriages tend to take place in very conservative areas with a low tolerance for divorce (legal or social) and tend to be favored by individuals with a low tolerance for divorce (cultural). A more accurate study would perform a cohort analysis of divorce rate across regions as divorce becomes legalized and normalized.
I don't have first hand experience, but my impression is that the best co-founders are those who you've got some history with, who you know and trust. That doesn't happen overnight.
Kind of like an actual dating site might be a good way to meet potential marriage partners, but you'd look at someone pretty weird if you went on a date and they suggested they want to get married right away.
But who knows; those guys see a lot of founders, maybe things work out differently.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. You said "best co-founders are those who you've got some history with, who you know and trust. That doesn't happen overnight"
I agree but then how do you start it in the first place ? Isn't the point of startup school or dating school is to connect people and then from that, over time you can build that history and trust and then use that as consideration whether you want them as your co-founder ?
My theory is that people are looking for people to start a company with ASAP, rather than 4-5 years in the future after they've worked together for a while.
If you register now for Startup School 2019, you can now start using the directory to find other single founders looking for a cofounder. Filter by proximity, vertical and company description. This is a really great free resource to help you do the single best thing to help your startup.
Over 11K founders have already signed up for Startup School. Classes start July 22nd. https://startupschool.org
That's when you had to apply to Startup School for limited spots. Now it's open to everyone for free, which means we don't require the intro video to just register/signup for the class.
This year, each lecture is no more than 20 minutes. On any given week, there will be a max of 1 hour of video content for you to watch. More important than the lectures will be dedicating 30-60 minutes each week to participate in group sessions with other SUS founders.
At the minimum, to be considered active: you need to submit a weekly update about your progress every week (probably 5-15 minutes max).
Every week we release about an 1 hour of video content for you to watch.
Every week, there are group sessions with other SUS founders for you to talk about your startup. These should be about 30-60 minutes.
We provide discussion questions before your group sessions to give you topics to think about. Between 10-30 minutes of prep depending on how seriously you take it.
If you come to a SUS meetup in person, those are probably 2 hour events.
As you can see, it's probably a max of 2-3 hours a week in regards to time we ask of you. How much time you dedicate to your startup is up to you.
Yes! It's okay if you don't know which idea you want to pursue. Our first lecture actually goes over how to evaluate ideas for potential and helping you weigh and decide which to pursue.
