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by brianwawok 3254 days ago
Not sure this even matters that much. What matter is YOU.

Who cares if 12% of solo founders make a successful exit, vs 14% of two founder companies. If you are a lone wolf and want to work alone, you are going to fail if not alone. If you are a social thinker and hate working alone, you would be silly to form a solo startup.

4 comments

What if you're a lone wolf, and you discover 20% of duos successfully exit and 0.1% of solos successfully exit. Perhaps that is your come-to-jesus moment.
but what if you cant find anyone, or you too introverted to find anyone to work with, I'm very technical, but find it extremely difficult to speak with them, often im asked by others to just make something for them and thats it.
Having a hard time convincing someone else to work with you/on your idea, being excessively introverted, etc might be some of the underlying factors that might lead to a 200x difference in success likelihood in the posited, hypothetical case.
There have been some amazing projects by lone wolfs. Not all projects need a team.
Not considering the factors of success is a terrible strategy.
Overthinking factors of success can also be stifling as it may lead to analysis paralysis. Just do it is a better way to do it, so to speak.
knowing that startups located in city X have .1 success rate compared to city Y, tells you where to start. Or at least, it makes you wonder what makes Y more succesful, is it VC? talent? etc...

It's simple.

No thats survivorship bias. If you dont need easy access to SF, then starting in SF is a terrible idea. Way better COL elsewhere.
I agree, I don't think this really matters to the individual startup (in that there are probably much stronger factors for success than # of founders).

But it may matter for investors looking at things with the opposite perspective - for example, is it a good/bad heuristic to ignore companies with 5+ founders?

Agreed. When they say something like 90% of all new businesses fail, that doesn't mean you shouldn't start a new business, it just means a lot of stupid ill prepared people start businesses and fail. Which has absolutely no bearing on YOUR chances of success.