What Do Solo Founders Need?
There is no doubt about it, founding a company is hard. From tech billionaires like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to consumer product builders like Sara Blakely from Spanx, every founder has a daunting startup story. But what these shining examples of success have in common is the fact that they both began with just one person.
Jeff Bezos built Amazon from the ground up (literally he was packing boxes on the ground for the first few years of the company) and Sara Blakely had to get turned down by an endless number of male investors before one would even hear out her idea (thanks to his two daughters who were incredibly supportive of it when he showed them the product).
Solo founders are just not taken seriously by the general startup sphere.
Most startup accelerators strongly encourage entrepreneurs who apply to find a co-founder. While none of them ban solo founders from their programs, they are vocal about their desire to work with teams.
The most well-known startup accelerator, Y-Combinator, was founded by Paul Grahm and in a 2006 essay entitled The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups, he lists being a single founder as the first mistake a new entrepreneur can make. In the very first section, he writes, “What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no…
