[Abishek_Muthian]

I ran my company successfully as a single founder for 5 years, till one day I was told I would become a quadriplegic & I had to close my company as there's no other executive to take care of it.

I had Facebook Fb Start accelerated product with 2,50,000 customers , any company expressing interest in acquiring my product wanted me to work for them; which wasn't possible as I was recovering from surgery.

Being single founder has it's merit, but when things go south with your health or anything personal; you'll loose your company.

I used to despise YCombinator's co-founder requirement, now I advice everyone to get a co-founder before they start their operations.

[graeme]

Good point. I think any single founder should bear this in mind.

Note that depending on scale and industry, you can design around this to an extent. My company largely runs automatically. I mostly work on growing it. I have a contract programmer and support rep who handle stuff. Requires very little day to day input from me.

Don't get me wrong. If I became quadrapeligic, things would gradually break. But depending on time required away, I could have someone come and take input from me on some decisions, stop some functions, etc

I got this from the 4 hour workweek, which is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to make a solo business based on systems.

I do know the system works incidentally: there have been periods where for 1-2 months I did almost nothing. Just coming out of one due to a concussion that knocked me out of work. The business grew nonetheless, though I have a backlog of some things to take care of.

So, if you are starting a solo business, you have a bus factor of 1. You should consider the design of it, and what happens if you become unable to work on it.

Of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.

[Abishek_Muthian]

> of course, this bars you from some industries or business models.

Not just that, there are numerous other variables. e.g. The environment,I started my company in India when there was no definition for a startup, so my startup was no different than a Billion dollar corporation from the eyes of the government.

So, as a single founder I spent much of my initial years trying to learn all compliances & adhering to them(there are dozen new ones every month); while the product development went un-interrupted through the developers (whom I personally trained) & via automated systems.

Startups in a better environment had a competitive advantage of having to focus only on their company's growth even when being a single founder.

[graeme]

Oh yeah, that wasn't a criticism of you. Just wanted to leave that for single founders to think about as they structure their businesses.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I wouldn't mind a criticism either, just wanted to bring up startup environment issues & to factor in when deciding sole founder vs otherwise.

Edit : Tried to be succinct.