Reflections on being a solo founder, one year in
I’m the solo founder & CEO of a startup. The common dogma is that co-founders are all but necessary to build a successful startup. We’ve raised a ‘fat seed’ and have been running for a bit over a year - here are the positives and negatives I’ve noticed so far.
Disclaimer: There are almost certainly long-term negative consequences of being a solo founder that I haven’t encountered yet; this focuses on the situations that you may run to in the early stages of company building! Also, this is an n of 1. YMMV.
POSITIVES
Letting go of my legos | While delegating can be difficult for some founders, I learned how to do it well quickly because I had no choice - it was either learn to delegate or don’t get critical work done!
Empowering leaders within the team | I quickly had to become comfortable giving my team room to lead. Team members have nearly full autonomy in decision making. Even if I wanted to, I simply do not have the time to micromanage.
Learned to hire executives early | With the traditional technical + business co-founder pairing, you may be able to delay hiring executives for a while; I had to hire highly technical execs almost immediately. Learning how to hire execs so early in such a high stakes situation significantly improved my hiring chops for all levels.
Quick & efficient decision making | There is no ambiguity or variance across the leadership team - I execute quickly on key company decisions. This has let us run incredibly fast and turn on a dime when new data presents itself.
Easy to be generous with the team | Our earliest team members have ~10% ownership in total, and those after have above average market equity packages with reserves for growth. In my opinion you should do this no matter how many cofounders you have, but as a solo founder it was especially easy to overcome any greed-based resistance to ‘giving away’ so much of the company.
No drama | Co-founder fights are infamous; this is a category of stress I have completely avoided.
NEGATIVES
Difficult to pull away | By far the biggest negative. This is damaging in the short term for things like fundraising and likely has longer term ramifications that I don’t realize now.
Power dynamics hinder feedback | You can’t fire a co-founder (usually), so they have no hesitation to give you feedback you might hate to hear. You can fire a team member, and that power dynamic makes getting critical feedback more difficult, even subconsciously.
Your flaws and bad habits permeate further in the company | Co-founders often compliment each other, both in skillsets and personalities. There is no counterbalance to me on the team, and I’ve noticed some of my flaws (e.g., prioritizing) have permeated the company’s culture
You have to hire quickly | This is expensive and time consuming, and potentially impossible if you haven’t raised enough capital.
No more indulging in the technical work | I am a technical founder, but all I do day-to-day is the traditional CEO tasks (recruiting, managing, fundraising, communicating, extinguishing fires). While I’ve learned unbelievable amounts in the last year, it’s been sad watching my scientific chops wither.
NEUTRALS
No impact on fundraising | It barely came up.
No impact on hiring | No one cared.
I use my investors to hold myself accountable & test ideas | Because of this they see a less polished version of me than perhaps their other founders, which caused some issues early on. Regardless, this has worked well for me and my investors eventually adjusted to my style.
No impact on emotional resilience | A common reason for co-founder necessity is that startups are hard and no one can empathize as well as a co-founder. I have a core team that I am abnormally transparent with, founder friends, and a good relationship with my VCs that surrogate for this completely. Also, Twitter ;)
It’s probably personality dependent | I execute best independently; conversely, I’m sure there are many people that perform 10X better with the right co-founder.
February 17th, 2021