The Co-Founder Mythology - Mark Suster (opens in new tab)

The situation he describes is a lot more common then you guys probably think.

Amazing things happen in a great partnership, but it's as rare as breakaway success companies, and probably highly correlated.

Get the founder vesting, also forget about 50%/50% it's the dumbest way to start the company.

So I am a single-founder. For me, and it is worth nothing that I have a sum total of 28 users on my site, it is not that I feel that I need a co-founder or even a partner. What I need is a collaborator!

Everyone, everyone, everyone says to me 'oh, your a single-founder. When are you going to get a co-founder?' I feel like a handmaiden sometimes.

All I really want, desperately need, is a collaborator, a mentor, a sounding board. If that person is co-founder so be it. Funding should be dependent on team and 'team' is not always a 'founder'.

...sorry I know that was slightly outside the scope of the topic, /rantoff.

Why editorialize a submission title?

Co-founding is often spoken of as if it's a binary state as Mark points out, it's not. A cofounder who's not 50% committed is a more expensive and less use than a 100% committed first employee. First employees take salary though which takes investment and investors require co-founders.

It's a shame that the data on this is going to become more and more sparse over the next few years as investors locks in on multiple co-founders and single founders become more and more rare.

hey matt mireles, why isn't speakertext powering this site?

From my experience you don't need 'cofounders' as much as you need capabilities like design, engineerings, marketing, the optimist, the networking machine, etc... Some people have only one of these skills and need to make up for the others with employees or cofounders. Others have more than 1 skill and can push a product farther along.

He says, "I'm not telling you don't do it... [but if you have a cofounder] make sure you have founder vesting."

I just saw the entire talk, and its very interesting from start to end.

I would recommend it to anyone that feels the 'entepreneurial tickles'.

Also, in my opinion, the lean startup and fail fast chapters give really good advice.

Thanks for posting this

aside: odd he didn't mention Hewlett and Packard, Woz and Jobs, Gates and Allen, Warnock and Geschke (Adobe), the intel founders, oracle founders. Most (not all) seem to fall into tech vs. biz roles, with overlapping abilities.

I would have thought the most important benefit of co-founders is someone to bounce-n-build ideas. But the dual tech/biz roles really suggest it's based either on abilities for different tasks; or on modularizing the complexity of dealing with those different tasks.

As an example of the latter: I've recently experienced of this as a one-founder in that when negotiating a large and complex contract, I simply don't have any of that extra spark of intelligence/gumption/whatever left over to overcome the complex technical obstacles that regularly come up.