| This article could be a chapter in the book How to Lie with Statistics. It is clearly a biased sample, listing only "successful" companies but not the much larger set of unsuccessful ones. The "exception" of Excite thrown in with 6 founders, IMO makes the author's intentions (conscious or unconscious) clear since one would expect some argument about whether Excite was really a success in the end. Then there is the question of what constitutes a founder. This isn't always so easy to define. How many people founded IBM? Despite Thomas Watson being listed as the "founder" of IBM, it is hard to even answer this question since IBM was formed out of the merger of three companies before it was even called IBM. (http://www.answers.com/topic/history-of-ibm) Several responders pointed out correctly that the number of potential communications channels rises as the number of founders increases. And while that's clearly true, it is also true that more founders means more mouths to feed early in the company's development. And to run any business you need to learn to manage communication amongst your team. Finally, one has to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. Just because Microsoft was founded by two people, doesn't mean that was the primary reason for their success. It might also have had something to do with who the two people were after all. ;) |