Paul Buchheit: "We definitely fund [solo founders], but you have to be about 4 times as good. I think Instacart was a solo founder, and that's a great company. We're very happy to fund single founders; it's really more for your benefit. If you can possibly find someone, it really does help."
As a solo founder from the w14 batch: I can tell you it feels more difficult to do everything yourself. I'd recommend if you can organically find someone to work with on the company, you should.
Happy to answer any solo founder related questions, if you have them.
Yea, I know that it's much better if you have cofounder (there are so many tasks to do), but I believe it should be the right person, and wrong person can make much more damage then help.
As a solo founder, how did you improve your productivity on early stage: what kind of tasks you usually delegated to someone else (like freelancer) if you did.
I had a cofounder who split about 3 months before, but he wasn't full-time and hadn't contributed any code in the months leading up to it.
I had hired a sales guy right before yc, which helped somewhat. During yc, I basically bounced between growth tasks which was really difficult. I'm still figuring it out tbh.
We now have a larger team which helps a lot... But I still often miss the camaraderie of having someone who 100% has your back.
The other thing is a sense of impostor syndrome to fight against... I feel like I don't have anyone who will see a bigger picture totally, so I find myself doubting my decisions much more frequently.
So glad you're open to solo-founder questions, thank a bunch. In your experience, do you think that you might just have unreasonably high standards for partners compared to people who have successfully matched with cofounders?
Would love to share the climb with a co-founder. Outreach efforts have put me in touch with smart, creative, educated people in the Bay Area. But to my surprise, I just haven't met a truly gritty, determined person yet. Started projects with the people I found anyways. It always feels like playing tea party with stuffed animals. Not a good experience for them, or me.
These lovely people live pleasant, balanced, healthy, entertaining, lives. Bless them. Nothing wrong with that! But they don't have crazy drive. Don't wanna run circles around a partner in any project. Want a cofounder to be my equal or superior in energy and persistence, that we can chase each other's effort, enhance each other's growth/success, and the project's growth/success.
I don't want a pampered, entertaining life. I want to struggle, grow, learn, achieve. Not sure how to find partners to share those values with. Should I make sure that partners share those values, or are these criteria unreasonable/misguided?
Flying solo for now. Later, maybe self-made success on a larger scale/stage may draw special people to me, so I don't have to actively search. A co-founder isn't a necessity for me, just a highly desired and recommended luxury, if I can reasonably get one. When a commenter above said, in paraphrase, "Going solo isn't impossible, you just need to be four times better", I just think "Fine, I'll work to get there."
Am I doing it wrong? Right? Sound familiar or was your co-founder-less situation different?
IMHO I think the chances are perhaps based on how competitive the batch is. Also are you a technical or non-technical founder. Also is it a sole founder + CTO/hires or just only 1 founder. From their point of view, they probably can consider the merits of your skill but the likelyhood is if you desire to scale (which YC can help with) it will require more than 1 person. It can be done by one person but im sure it can certainly can be overwhelming for one person and scaling a business as it can require sometimes more than only 1 person.
