| I think that this article is "meh," so let's look at it step-by-step: 1. Emotional Support Author gets emotional support from wife and admits that you will need someone to help you through the shit-storm that is founding a start-up. But most young entrepreneurs don't have spouses. Seems like a co-founder fits the bill here. 2. External Validation A couple of points: you should listen to your customers, but your customers are a very bad barometer for gauging big company decisions -- sometimes you need to make changes that they won't like. Changes that are good for the company (or changes that help you pivot) but piss off significant portions of your customer base; the customer is not always right. So if customers are a bad source of validation, what about other entrepreneurs? Let's face it: they are busy with their own projects to give you any meaningful feedback. The author's last point is to "write that down" -- seriously? Just get a co-founder. 3. Ideas / Brainstorming Brainstorming is not merely spit-balling. Author says that "you want to prevent brainstorming ideas and possible solutions that are inherently not viable or even true" -- but who else knows your company as well as a co-founder? I.e. who else could gauge whether or not solutions are viable (or true)? Let's ignore the shameless plug here (and the fact that using a website for brainstorming seems prima facie silly); I just want to point out that brainstorming outside of your company is worthless. You, quite obviously, need to brainstorm with someone in your company. Might as well make it a co-founder. 4. Skills / Capacity It seems pretty obvious that you want to do something in the tech arena, you need to be pretty tech-savvy. If you're not tech-savvy, you need to associate yourself with someone that is. There's a good reason investors don't invest in business people. I remember listening to a talk by some of the people at Mint. One of their anecdotes went something like so: "When you go and pitch to a VC, every programmer is +$50mil in valuation, and every suit & tie "business guy" is -$100mil in valuation." Apart from the intuitive attractiveness of this train of thought, there also has not (ever) been a successful "business guy" with no tech expertise and no technical co-founder doing much of anything in the start-up world. Finally, let me just say that the people at YC know what they are doing. They rarely accept single-founder start-ups for a very good (and obvious) reason. The lack of technical expertise is also a big red flag. After all, if I've never seen the inside of an engine why would a bank fund an auto-shop I want to build. |