[jamongkad]

Ohh the dreaded "single founder thread" Let the good times roll on this one.

Ok I'm a single founder, when I read PG's essays about singles, I experienced a wave of insecurity on my part which lasted approximately 3-4 months. Whatever experiences I had back then could more likely reflect the experiences felt by other single founders here.

Most YCer's know the game and how it's played. We all know to a certain degree that the odds are stacked against you when you're a single founder. I won't wax rhetoric with you cuz I'm sure you'll find a ton of posts about that.

My point is this when I couldn't find a suitable co-founder I said screw it, I'm building my product by myself with no venture backing whatsoever. If it fails, it fails. If it succeeds then great. You won't know whats out there for you until you go out and let your balls hang out so to speak. Go out there and build it no matter the odds, no matter what other people think, if you did your homework and think there's market for it. Go do it! there is no better time to test out that idea of yours than now. Open source and low low hardware costs present us a low barrier of entry in order for us to carry this out.

There are alot of naysayers that will tell you this and that. But the way I see it only time and customers/users will tell you if your product is a success or not. And that my friend matters more than anything. Single founder or not.

[fireandfury]

Lol about the "dreaded single founder thread". I don't keep up with YC News everyday, so after I posted I figured that this topic has definitely come up before. Oh well. Maybe people have changed their views since the last time it was posted and have interesting things to share.

Yeah, it seems like a good idea to just start building alone if there is no one else to do it with. People can be added later.

[cwilbur]

One of the things you must realize to make sense of a lot of PG's advice is that the default business model for YC companies is to build a promising product so that venture capitalists will give you money or that a Yahoo/Google/Microsoft will buy your company.

For those two goals, which are based as much on impressing investors as on anything else, your chances are much better if you're not a single founder. Investors are much happier investing in a team than they are investing in a single person. To that end, PG's advice against single founders is spot on.