Hey guys. I’m curious as to the community’s thoughts about the video (and YC’s advocacy in general) with requiring a co-founder for startups in most cases. YC claims that many of the most successful startups were co-founded (probably statistically accurate), and highly supports co-founders as crucial to a company’s success. There are many successful co-founded companies as well as many successful solo founded companies (ex: Amazon). What are your thoughts about the true importance for a co-founder? Is it as far stretched as YC claims? Can a company not move forward sufficiently given that a solo founder is sound and resourceful in filling gaps otherwise handled by a co-founder? The reason behind my questions are that there are some challenges to co-founding companies and finding co-founders at later stages, the top of which (in my opinion) are finding people who are a true value-add, complementary, and committed. One major example here is with a co-founder leading marketing and distribution. In the beginning, is it not enough to use a marketing agency, lead generation, and/or consultants to bridge the gap till reaching a point of obtaining traction to raise a seed round in order to bring in someone full-time? My position until recently was as a full-time employee, and so time constraints were a factor in deciding to spend time developing product and talking to customers, or trying and do both as well as take on looking for a co-founder.

What if you’re capable of developing an MVP on your own (which I have done), and have decent domain expertise to plan and drive distribution? Then, is it worth taking the time to search for a co-founder? I'm interested to hear perspectives from both solo and co-founded startups. What has your experience been?