[mbrubeck]

"Companies succeed with single founders all the time. Just look at Digg, Craigslist, eBay, Netflix, Wordpress, Wikipedia, Amazon, TechMeme, PBWiki, TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Etsy."

Is this true? I know it's hard to define "founder" precisely, since some co-founders may get involved after the idea is partly baked, or may not have as much of an impact. But several of these seem to be questionable. (And Techmeme is misspelled... twice.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress - "It was first released in May 2003 by its co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a (considered the official) successor to b2\cafelog." (Or if you meant Wordpress.com / Automattic, it also has multiple co-founders.)

http://etsy.com/about - "Etsy was founded by Rob Kalin, Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell in June, 2005."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix - "Netflix was founded in 1997 in Scotts Valley, California by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software, along with Mitch Lowe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg - "Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBworks - "PBworks (formerly PBwiki) is a commercial collaboration service created by David Weekly, with Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt joining shortly thereafter as co-founders."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia - "Launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger..."

[ChristianPerry]

You're right -- "founder" is a tough measurement. A lot of times -- as in the case of my own company, RFOP -- one person starts a company, sees a bit of success, then quickly brings on a small group of peers who join with the "co-founder" moniker.

As a company grows, it quickly evolves from a solo effort to (some variation of) a team effort. This can mean bringing on employees, or people who join as "co-founder." At PayPal, for instance, more than a half-dozen of the first employees were accorded "co-founder" status, which is why the company appears to have so many.

Further complicating the matter, many companies change their story after they reach success, presenting a company as a joint effort or team project, rife with co-founders and collaborators, when the truth is closer to one visionary bringing an idea to life, and assembling a team thereafter.

For instance, Digg. I was at a dinner a few years ago and had the pleasure of sitting next to Owen Byrne, one of the people mentioned above. Owen wrote the original code for Digg. He told me that Kevin Rose found him off of ELance. Until then, he was a fairly unknown Canadian programmer. His success has surely increased since taking on what started as a $2,000 contract gig, but I hesitate to call him a "co-founder."

99 times out of 100, companies build teams in order reach success. However, in many of those circumstances, that kernel of success starts not with a small team reaching consensus, but a single visionary with a single vision.

[ojbyrne]

Obviously I'm biased, but Kevin had little if any vision other than finding a new job. And he was much less known then he is now, after a careful, well-crafted and expensive PR campaign. And yes, I was an "unknown coder" but also an MBA, Ph.D candidate, and I spent years haranguing the business editor of our local paper about how corrupt the news business was. Many people I respect have summed up Kevin in a single word - "shallow."

And to reiterate, elance was not involved in digg. That also was part of the PR campaign.

[sireat]

I remember getting one of those email postings from elance a year or two ago, where it was explicitly mentioned about Digg being started through elance. What is the real story then?

[ojbyrne]

That's impressive. I did do a couple of small jobs for Kevin nearly a year and a half before digg, so I guess they can claim we were introduced through it. But there were so many new fees and restrictions on providers that it was just a nightmare to use by the time digg appeared, that I had moved on.

[pg]

Amazon also had two founders, Bezos and Shel Kaphan.

[dataman85]

In his linkedin profile Shel Kaphan describes himeself as Amazon's first employee.

[Harj]

wikipedia and craigslist are such outliers in so many ways, they don't add much support for the single founder argument at all