As a single founder who's about to close his seed round (and was rejected from YC), I'm deeply concerned that opinions toward single founders are devolving from aversion, to bias, to self-fulfilling prophecy. With every step, investors are forfeiting the ability (or inclination) to evaluate this issue on the merits.
I personally have no trouble working with others, nor difficulty enrolling others in my vision. I am extremely emotionally stable—I don't take things personally and have little trouble riding the ups and downs. I acknowledge that there are benefits to a cofounder that I'm missing out on (as well as drawbacks I'm avoiding!), but simply put, it's disappointing to see many investors marching lock-step to the beat of someone else's drum.
I take a very simple perspective on this "single founder aversion".
If some investor is going to ignore my traction and business just because I achieved it without signing on a token co-founder, then frankly it is their loss and I won't hesitate to politely tell them that. By definition getting to the same results without co-founders requires a much higher level of ability than if being part of a "collective". Any investor failing to recognize that is going to miss out some of the best deals and that is really their problem.
The main focus should be on pleasing customers and partners and if you do that right, eventually the right investors come along (with better terms too). Much better approach than to structure your company solely to please investors and forget what the business is all about.
You might even end up with a business making money and no investors to answer to (or at least investors not having significant control over you). What a terrible thing!
PS: Quite a few people promoted to "co-founders" should really be employees with accountability for specific tasks and projects, not an open-ended license to call the shots.
"By definition getting to the same results without co-founders requires a much higher level of ability than if being part of a 'collective'"
I think in order for this to be true, you'd have to assume that the team as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not always the case with cofounders.
In general, though, I agree with you. Results speak for themselves; build a business for customers, not investors.
By definition getting to the same results without co-founders requires a much higher level of ability
I don't think this is a compelling argument--investors don't care about your ability, they care about your company's results. If this is true, then co-founders are indeed a better bet.
Every screening mechanism is imperfect. Once everyone starts requiring co-founders, then there's a lot of value as an angel to being willing to consider single founders. But that doesn't mean investors who avoid single founders are wrong to worry.
I personally have no trouble working with others, nor difficulty enrolling others in my vision. I am extremely emotionally stable—I don't take things personally and have little trouble riding the ups and downs
I'll leave the HAL 9000 jokes to someone who can afford the karma hit...
I guess the Forbes bloggers are in need of material..? Although that said I can't say the articles were particularly bad. Maybe it is a stretch to continue to focus on the same article after it's been published as a feature. Certainly if nothing new and significant is being added it's a bit of a waste.
- you get to deal with the stress on your own (or maybe you have a
supportive spouse)
- you can't have soundboard sessions with your co-founders
- you can't divide the labor
- you have to have a lot of expertise in a variety of fields
- if you get ill early on it will likely kill the company
- nobody will call you out when you're spouting nonsense
- likely a long long list of stuff following these
The upside (and it's a huge upside)
- you don't have to deal with your co-founders
That one single factor does not outweigh the other ones but it is much better to have no co-founders than to have the wrong co-founder. And you can't really know in advance if you have the right co-founder or not. You'll know when you are in your first very heavy weather but by then it is too late to easily switch.
That's why even if having co-founders is good plenty of people chose to go it alone, and end up hiring what would have been co-founders as early employees once they've established a certain level of success.
If having no co-founders was a guaranteed fail nobody would do it, but plenty of people get by just fine to prove that it is not a hard and fast law, but more of a statistical issue.
I started a business in college, by myself, and it had revenues of about 6 million by the time I hit 25. I'm now 30 and on my second business, which I also started and am now running by myself.
Why don't I elaborate on some upsides to your little list?
* You are the only one. That means if something goes wrong, you can't shift the blame. Not even subconsciously. It's always your fault. This guarantees problems get fixed and they get fixed fast.
* You are the only one. That means you don't have to get approval or dilute your ideas. It gets implemented. Now. If you're spouting bullshit, the market will filter and you will adjust, fast.
* You are the only one. You have to do everything. That means you understand every aspect of your business, because at some point, you did it. This helps you make effective decisions.
* You are the only one. etc etc etc
You get the idea. I can go on forever and you can go on forever listing wonderful things about co-founders. One way isn't better than another. They are different and the path you take depends on your goals.
If your goal is to build a business that grows into hundred-million+ entity so you can cash out or where you can garner a cult following (i.e. Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Larry Ellison/etc), you need a co-founder. On the other hand, if you want a business where you can pour your unmitigated passion into, where it becomes a place that not only supports you, but where your ideas take form, a co-founder will just get in your way. To dumb it down, if the #1 goal on your list is money or status, bring somebody else on. You won't be able to compete by your lonesome. However, if the #1 goal on your list is the freedom to do things the way you want to do them ... the only way to accomplish that is to remove as many obstacles to that as possible. That means no co-founders, no investors, none of it. A structure where you don't have to check with anyone before you do something.
This, by the way, explains why most investors are completely against companies with no co-founders. It's not in their interest. The goals of the company do not align with their goals.
Good stuff. Dealing with your co-founders indeed expands into a long list all by itself, to make it explicit is better.
Freedom is indeed the #1 reason I had when I decided to be a 'single founder' (in fact, it wasn't a conscious decision at the time, I only realized it after the fact) and getting an investor on board was the last thing on my mind.
What if Arash had turned out to be a bad match? They didn't know each other, so it was a pretty big gamble.
I suppose if Drew retained control he could prevent it destroying the company, but then he doesn't really have an equal co-founder to keep him in check.
Seems like a really tough problem. Kind of amazing it worked out so well.
Oddly enough Drew and I talked about this question tonight on a panel at the Computer History Museum. It was a big risk to recruit someone as a cofounder that he didn't know before (and I've seen a lot of cases where it didn't work out) but in this case the risk was mitigated by how much they had in common.
One thing they had in common was Kyle Vogt of Justin.tv, who introduced them. So in retrospect the YC alumni network was having a big effect even back then.
Even if the roulette ball drops into the slot 00, the play was still a "big risk", and so was, under the circumstances, insisting on a cofounder. That is, given how much Drew had already done, a cofounder had to be mostly just downside risk. The 'mitigation' had to be minimal.
Or, Drew's left hand doesn't fight with his right hand, but cofounders can easily fight.
If a cofounder is really needed, then so be it. But a cofounder is always risky, and a single founder who has already done well starting the business has a big advantage just because his left hand won't fight with his right hand.
Now a single founder can do much more than in past years, even just five years ago.
And here's a big point: always in a startup very much want the CEO to 'understand his business'. In an IT software startup, that includes understanding the software. But software has now changed: E.g., with .NET, nearly everything needed in commercial computing, and a larger fraction of Web site construction, is already in the .NET classes. So, the work is just writing a little 'glue' code between the uses of the classes. So, the coding goes VERY quickly. But what doesn't go quickly is understanding the classes because need about 10 books each of 500-1000 pages and, even for just a Web site, about 3000 Web pages of documentation from MSDN. And, this understanding of .NET is just 'overhead' that have to pay just once per programming task solved with a .NET class actually understand well. So, to 'know his business', a CEO needs to know the relevant parts of, say, .NET. A cofounder can't help here. And once the CEO does have that .NET knowledge, there can be some serious question if a cofounder can add much. Just what the Linux world has in place of .NET I don't know, but it can't be both small and effective.
There is other evidence: Look up and down Main Street at the successful businesses that have been started there. Typically there's only one person who is the real 'founder'. Look at research: Bright ideas come first to just one person at a time. Period. Microsoft: A Bill Gates show. Apple: A Steve Jobs show. Berkshire: A Warren Buffett show. Renaissance: A James Simons show. Continue with the one man shows of Kolmogorov, von Neumann, Knuth, etc. and in music Heifetz, Rostropovich, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc.
It's tough enough to find a Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. Getting him a 'copainter' who would actually help would be impossible. As you add people to a team, the team regresses to the mean where you don't want to be. And, did I mention fights? Sorry 'bout that.
Bill Gates had Paul Allen, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger. You can argue that one-half of these duos produced more than the other but would they have been able to without the support of the other half?
"would they have been able to without the support of the other half?" The evidence overwhelmingly, yes they would have been successful. You are correct that Gates, Jobs, and Buffett are not perfect examples of successful sole founders, but the question is, can a sole founder be successful? The 'rub' in this question is, can just one guy, alone, making all the decisions alone, do well? Then the examples of Gates, Jobs, and Buffett are quite relevant because each did great things essentially alone.
For Jobs, whatever might say about Woz and Jobs's first period at Apple, later Jobs did very well alone at Next, Pixar, and back at Apple. For those last three gigs, Woz was somewhere in the nickel seats. Yes, the success with Woz gave Jobs a lot of cash that was no doubt important for him in his last three gigs. So, then we say that Jobs is an example of a three time successful sole founder with cash. So, with cash a sole founder can work.
After the success of MS/DOS and Allen leaving Microsoft, Gates really had to reinvent, 'refound' the company. It is fair to say that he was a founder again. Yes, he was a founder with cash, but he was still acting essentially alone. Again, the issue is, can a sole founder do it alone, and that is what we are addressing. With the cash from MS/DOS, Gates did it alone. It's amazing what he did because he crushed IBM, Sun, Lotus, Netscape, DB2, and more.
For Buffett, no way should we count Ben Graham! He wrote a book and was a prof of Buffett at Columbia and possibly a friend. Graham had likely hundreds of students and millions of readers, but there was just one Berkshire. So, for Berkshire I don't credit Graham.
For Munger's role, that's just a judgment call, but my reading is that Buffett didn't much need him. Partly I draw that conclusion because it appears in recent years Buffett has been making his decisions essentially just alone.
Again, the main issue is, can a sole founder really get the work done or will he go off the deep end, for fast women, slow horses, cheap booze, wacko ideas, etc.? Well, Gates, Jobs, and Buffett didn't do any of these bad things.
There's another great example: Fred Smith at FedEx. I absolutely, positively guarantee you that there I know in fine detail just what the heck I'm talking about: FedEx was due almost entirely just to Smith, not Art Bass, Roger Frock, Mike Basch, ..., or me. Yes, it's true that Smith had a fortune from Southern Greyhound.
But with a fortune, it's easy, right? Tell that to Carly Fiorina, John Akers, Gil Amelio, Pat Dunn, etc.
Allen and Woz both left early on. Allen was in a plane wreck and/or got cancer or some such? Woz was gone before Jobs was at Next, Pixar, or back at Apple. I'm sure Jobs had a mother, also, but as I wrote, and is clearly the case, Apple, that is, the currently successful company, was a one man show from Jobs. While Munger is a bright guy, my reading is as I wrote it: Berkshire is a Buffett show.
A cofounder is most critical a factor in the early stages of a business. Apple and Microsoft were already established companies to a larger degree when the cofounders left
Sure. Still, what I said is on target: Gates, Jobs, etc. did the big, huge growth just from their own brains. There's no good reason to believe that they could not have done all of the success, including the first days, essentially alone also.
Really, for the "early stages of a business", that is JUST what Jobs faced at Next, Pixar, and back at Apple. What he and Woz did for the Apple II was nearly irrelevant except it did leave Jobs with the cash from his sale of all his Apple stock except one shart. So, we're not talking the value of a cofounder but the value of a founder with cash!
And for Gates, as MS/DOS took off, Microsoft was just awash in cash. About then, Allen left. So, the real building of Microsoft was due to Gates and cash. It's not the least bit clear that Gates ever really needed Allen as a cofounder. Similarly for Jobs and Woz.
Early stages of a business in this context is way earlier than what you are referring to. We are talking the stage that YC gets involved: usually just the founders, working out of their apartment / garage. That is not, as you argue, the same situation that jobs faced at those other ventures.
I think you're missing the point here. How they parted does not matter much. What matters is that without the other they would have never made it to where they got.
Sure, Woz helped get Apple started. Then with that start, Jobs had cash that helped him at Next and Pixar and back at Apple where he worked for $1 a year. So, Jobs was really the 'founder' of the success at Next, Pixar, and the Apple we know today. Your point is just that the early success at Apple gave Jobs cash. With cash, Jobs was a wildly successful sole founder at Next, Pixar, and his return to Apple where the cash was relevant but not the early Apple or Woz.
The issue is, can a sole founder be successful? The evidence from Jobs at Next, Pixar, and Apple upon his return is, with cash, yes. So, just for the people involved, Jobs is a great example of a successful sole founder in his last three gigs.
You are bending over backwards to refuse to see this. Why don't you go on and say that the iPod was due to his mother while you are at it?
Again, yet again, so that even you might be able to get it, is Jobs, with some cash, was three times a successful sole founder. That's the issue: A sole founder, and three times he was. Even you can get that now.
You are just flatly refusing to pay any informed attention at all to history or to read what the heck I actually wrote.
Take Gates: When Allen was still around, Microsoft was a still a small company IBM was still laughing at. Then Allen left. Gates, it was JUST Gates, went on to build Windows 3, Office, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, IE, Windows Server, SQL Server, Windows XP, and more. Gates grew his fortune from a few hundred million dollars to $50 billion or so. That growth was due to Gates. Period. And that was the significant growth that blew the doors off IBM, Sun, HP, Lotus, etc. Got it now?
For Jobs, you are really working to be brain-dead: What Woz and Jobs did with the Apple II, etc. is nearly irrelevant to what Jobs did at Next, Pixar, and after his return to Apple. Apple became for a while the most valuable company in the world due to what Jobs did, Jobs, JUST Jobs, with Woz watching from the nickel seats. Sculley? Amelio? They just helped show how bright Jobs was.
For your "would have never made it to where they got", we have no way to know that.
You are illustrating a huge point that I did make: People like to fight. Even over something really obvious, people like to fight. If you and I were cofounders, then no matter what I did and no matter what success the company was having, you'd be fighting me every way you could think of, fighting, fighting, fighting, for no good reason except you just want to be fighting. There's no way you could be effective.
Without Woz apple would have never happened, because he designed their first flagship product. What Woz did back then is highly relevant because it was the thing that eventually enabled Jobs to start Next and buy Pixar.
Jobs and Woz to me are the ideal example of the sum being much greater than either part.
Without Paul Allen Microsoft as we know it would not have existed because he named Microsoft Microsoft.
Your insulting tone and capitals do not make you right, they're reminiscent of people raising their voice and making things personal just because they can't win an argument.
I read a bit in your comment history and this seems to be a recurring theme for you, it is almost as if you take this single founder thing personal. The way to prove that it works is to simply succeed. As a single founder myself I've been there, I've done the multiple-founder thing too (with mixed success). There are no guarantees, to pretend either way is a shoe-in is nonsense. But statistically speaking, and looking at things from the point of view of a guy or girl considering going it alone or from the point of view of an investor that has the choice to invest in a company founded by one or more people the statistics seem to point to more being the better choice. Exceptions will always happen. But the ones that you point to are not those exceptions.
We can't know anything about pasts and futures that didn't happen, but we can safely say that things that did happen and that were likely significant were at least as significant as anything that you think would have happened otherwise. Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen would probably never have said what you just said, and that alone marks them as potentially more successful. How you interact with others is an important factor in your chances for success, and being able to give credit where credit is due is another.
I agree that you and I should not be involved in any business because we'd probably fight, and you are making that point very eloquently.
"Without Paul Allen Microsoft as we know it would not have existed because he named Microsoft Microsoft."
So he named the company? Now you are being totally silly and showing that you are determined to fight with me for just silly reasons.
You are the one being 'personal'. You just don't want the argument made that sole founders can be a good bet and just want to stay with the PG and VC herd that cofounders are crucial, say, for naming the company and cut me down for not joining your herd.
Jobs was a successful sole founder at Next, Pixar, and his return to Apple. The only role from Woz and Jobs's first time at Apple was just cash, not Woz or a 'cofounder'. You are straining to deny that Jobs was successful in his last three gigs as a sole founder.
Gates? He had to refound the company after the success of MS/DOS and make Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Office all real. He did. Alone. While doing this, IBM was laughing at him. He knocked the socks off IBM, DB2, Lotus, WordPerfect, Sun, HP, and more.
Just look around you: Commonly cofounders and coleaders just suck. Big committees suck. Group decision making sucks. Take IBM, AT&T, GM, Sun, HP: In each case, the management suite and top management 'team' was awash in what was regarded as the best qualifications. Still, they all just sucked. The Navy knows better: On the bridge of a ship, there exactly one captain. Although one captain can be bad, two is usually worse.
Then you are ignoring the present for what is central at HN: IT startups, especially Web 2.0 startups. Elsewhere on this thread I've explained in good detail: A founder needs to understand his business; he needs to understand the software; the bottleneck in understanding the software is not the unique software of the company but just understanding the now huge software components available; that bottleneck can be passed by just one person at a time, essentially alone, or learning is not a spectator sport or a team sport; once a founder has passed this bottleneck, a cofounder becomes much less relevant than in the past. You can see this, if you want to.
The main issue here is sole founders or cofounders. The resolution is, net, having all the business between one pair of ears is a great advantage when it can be done, and now for a Web 2.0 startup it not only can be done but should be done. The 'team' of Michelangelo and anyone else would be nowhere nearly as good at painting the ceiling as just Michelangelo alone.
Eh I wouldn't call Jobs a sole founder of Pixar. Ed Catmull and John Lasseter are really the founders of Pixar. They wouldn't have become what they became without Job's support, but to call him a "sole founder" is a little bit of a stretch.
No one is denying that Gates,Jobs and Buffett accomplished incredible feats. I'm just arguing that, at the beginning, each had a partner to help get things started. Woz created the Apple 1 and 2 which brought incredible financial success to Apple allowing Jobs to later start Next and purchase Pixar from Lucas. Paul Allen was instrumental Microsoft's early days including coding Microsoft Basic and making deals. Gates had the chance to then operate from a strong position to grow Microsoft and lock in that monopoly. Warren Buffett has always said that he didn't create Bershire alone and that Charlie Munger (as well as Benjamin Graham) helped immensely.
I am currently a single founder and I disagree with the idea that you must have a co-founder to be successful. I'm just arguing that if you want to use Gates,Jobs and Buffett as your examples of single founders they don't hold up well.
Check out Eisner's books on partnerships. Buffett-Munger, Gates-Allen/Ballmer/French-Gates are all in there. Would they have been successes solo? Maybe. But partnership increased the odds, and also made it a bigger success.
I'm also a single founder, and I'm investing part of my own money that I've been saving from all these years as a developer.
Being a single founder is hard, you have to deal with everything from incorporating, accounting, writing code, design, worry about SEO, how to introduce your project to the world get some momentum, etc..
Plus, add that to the fact that I'm from Europe, VC is very complicated here.
But because it's hard we should be more appreciated and not put aside.
I'm working on it for at least 3 months now and it's 90% complete, I've been able to keep motivated and I've learned lot along the way.
I just felt that this was the right path to go for me, I didn't feel the need have someone as a parter on this. I may be wrong in a long run but for now I'm pretty satisfied with what I've done.
Obviously I don't agree with YC rule here, I understand some of their view points , but not everything is true or false. Some great projects maybe aren't being looked into because of the single-founder rule.
But then again, you don't have to apply to YC or any funding, try something else, or simple bootstrap you idea and see how it goes.
At this stage it cannot "fail" in the traditional sense. Even if it enters a downward spiral, at any point in time it could be sold for the user base alone (and the price would still likely to be bigger than Heroku)
Blockbuster has nothing to do with this. That was a failure in the traditional sense. I never argued that somebody is "too big to fail". The parent poster argued that if Dropbox failed, it would not be a big homerun. What I argued is that even if Dropbox valuation failed by say, 90% and it got sold, it would still net around 500MM. That would be a failure for the latest investors, but definitely still a heck of a success for YC (I am disregarding purposedly here liquidation preferences, etc, but you get the idea)
Yeah, right. You forget: That is easy in college, but actually much more difficult later in life when all your friends have jobs and family. In other words, works in some way as a nicely worded age discrimination. Not that it affects me, but getting older makes you more sensitive for these things ;)
You presumably know far more professional developers at a later stage of your career than someone fresh out of university, so you have a far bigger pool to find someone out of.
Most of the people who are just finishing university and getting into YC aren't people who would be struggling to find jobs, these are people who are choosing to work for a startup over going to work for Google or Goldman Sachs for a six-figure salary.
The fact that someone older is more likely to have a mortgage and family commitments and thus be unable to relocate for three months and give up their salary is far more likely to weed out older candidates than the co-founder requirement.
The 25-year old knows that if his startup fails he can easily find a first (or new) job at Google etc two years later. That does not apply to 45+ year olds. The risk is much higher.
I don't get this, presumably by that point in their career they'd have a huge network of people they've worked with in the past and who would be eager to hire them ?
When you're at that point in your career you cost a lot more to hire and there are fewer positions, especially since it's usually better to promote an insider instead of hiring a buddy from outside the company.
Are there any good examples where a single founder made it big, truly on his own? You can imagine that maybe Drew could have done it without Arash, or Gates could have done it without Allen, etc. But they didn't, which validates the exception. So before we casually say /oh if you don't feel like you need a co-founder then don't bother/, it would be good to know if any single founders have been successful.
And maybe we should define success as financial/market success, not emotional fulfilment or getting your first two round of funding.
Or perhaps people who thought they had a good idea or project and then took on a second founder in the hopes of getting into YC but then found that the person didn't work out.
Again, just a fast look at VC finances shows that VC just MUST hit 'home runs' such as Dropbox or better.
Then just a fast look at the history of home runs shows that get only a few each decade. And just a fast look at those home runs shows that a significant pattern is super-tough to see. And, any such pattern has only a few examples because the larger 'circumstances' change so much from one decade to another. E.g., it used to be that a trillion bytes was a REALLY large chunk of hard disk space, but now it's not so large just as main memory.
So, since have to be looking for such home runs under such circumstances, what good 'rules' can be formulated? Remember, we're looking for home runs and not trying to find a description of a VCs average arriving e-mail pitch.
Or we're looking for some tiny number of golden needles in in a huge pile of hay so that statements about some average about the hay are just irrelevant.
Well, one could guess, 'the first rule of VC is that there are no rules', but, actually, that is too strong.
But not good is the rule against 'single founders'. Why? With the larger circumstances today, a single founder has some big advantages. I will let readers fill in some of the advantages based on current circumstances just as an exercise!
Next, for 'the rules', there still are some that can apply to some of the startup candidates, One collection of such candidates is based on startups where the core 'secret sauce' is especially powerful and can be evaluated just technically. For a biomedical analogy, consider a safe, effective, cheap single pill cure for any cancer: Then just evaluate the pill and f'get about the founder because if do have the pill and if he did invent it, then f'get everything else about him! He invented the pill, for god's sake! Or, we know you are plenty smart, but could you have invented that pill? So, if he's smarter than you, then you've just gotta think that he's plenty smart. I mean, given that he invented that pill, what are the chances he's a doofus? Or, to be quite specific, even worst case, just what issues of 'business acumen' couldn't be solved by hiring him a COO, CFO, SVP Operations, SVP HR? And there's no good reason to suspect such a worst case or even a bad case. Or, did I mention, the guy invented the pill?
For meaningful rules to apply to all IT startup candidates, that seems to be asking too much.
The simple answer that will fit on the back of the usual 3 x 5" card of VC rules that even a VC can understand is, in looking for the crucial home runs, the first rule is there are no rules.
I don't understand where the fixation for multiple founders stems from. I know it increases the chances that the startup will succeed, but sometimes it's unnecessary.
I'm starting to think that it's more of a power struggle issue- If YC can't get one founder to agree with or sign off on something, then they want to be able to approach the other founder and convince them instead.
" I know it increases the chances that the startup will succeed, but sometimes it's unnecessary. "
Simply knowing that it increases the chances that the startup will succeed should be sufficient to understand where the fixation for multiple founders stems from. True, it's not required 100% of the time, but, a-priori, how can anyone know whether this is one of those times. There are a hundred well defined things that can contribute to the failure of a startup (in addition to the thousand less well defined things) - one thing that YC brings to the table is identifying that list of 100 things that can kill a startup so they can be avoided. Coming in with at least one cofounder brings the list to 99. Incorporating in Delaware to 98. Having someone who can code 97. etc, etc, etc...
Startups are just so much work. You need some help.
For example, if you have two founders, then one can go out and do fundraising for a month while the other keeps the company running. If you had only one founder, you'd be dead in the water for that month. (Even if you have employees -- things are going to decay if all of the founders are distracted.)
Also, I've never known YC to play founders against each other.
Secondary founders work for less pay than anyone else in exchange for large chunks of equity which can be a huge asset for a tiny company. Add in the validation of being able to convince someone else that you have a good enough idea to take such helps convince VC's that the idea has merit. Having someone else committed also means you have someone to bounce ideas off of at 7:30pm that knows the issues and can give new incite is huge. Finally, it reduces your buss factor where is someone get's sick the company can still operate.
Probably YC's way of saying, target this niche of single-founders because they are too mainstream. If you can handle investing in single-founders, you can rival YC I suppose.
I personally have no trouble working with others, nor difficulty enrolling others in my vision. I am extremely emotionally stable—I don't take things personally and have little trouble riding the ups and downs. I acknowledge that there are benefits to a cofounder that I'm missing out on (as well as drawbacks I'm avoiding!), but simply put, it's disappointing to see many investors marching lock-step to the beat of someone else's drum.