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4 min read Entrepreneurship

The Single Founder Dilemma

In this essay, I take a contrarian view that you can be the single founder if and only if you satisfy a set of conditions.

Here’s the question which I am being asked by many people who want to apply to accelerators or planning to start up new businesses. “Should I be the sole founder or find a co-founder?” The answer is not so straightforward. Most accelerators often preached the need to have co-founders and tend to drop applications by single founders. There is justification in why they chose to do so. After all, 9 in 10 startups fail, and, following on with you get 84% with multiple founders vs 16% with single founders in the successful startups. Does that mean that you should not attempt to be a single founder? In this essay, I take a contrarian view that you can be the single founder if and only if you satisfy a set of conditions.

Through talking to different entrepreneurs (and analyzing the successful single founders), I have established how a single founder can work out by satisfying the following conditions (and you do not need all of them, but a combination of some):

If you seriously want to be a single founder and you are confident that you can pull this off, my advice is that you should not even bother to apply to an accelerator or any similar organisations who preach the multiple founders mantra.