[xj]

I believe your answer is based on the assumption that founders work closely on every details, and working on several startups might get them distracted.

But how about recruiting the right people for the right job (well, this wouldn't be possible for startups with meager fund though) in each of the startups so that the ideas get implemented as they should, and the founders, rather than actually developing the projects ground up, merely act as project managers, monitoring the progress and validating the results against their vision.

[keiferski]

That's certainly possible, but even at that higher level of abstraction, there's still a ton of work to do. I can't imagine a PM at Facebook in 2007 or Google in 2003 having the time to run multiple projects at multiple companies.

It might work for smaller companies, but eventually you'll either have to focus on one, or zoom further out (and essentially become a VC).

[xj]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Steve jobs example cited above.

[argonaut]

That only works if you have a lot of money already (and I mean basically a seed round of investment). Otherwise, you'll need a technical co-founder at the very least.

[ig1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet

[xj]

The way they manage startups, yes. It's however very difficult to ideate so many (which these guys don't), but giving shape to a couple of ideas and managing them independently like these guys do is not impossible it seems.