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How Many Founders Does A Startup Need?

Written by: Brad Feld

Article Overview: I love my NewsGator and Technorati key word search feeds - they help me find the most interesting things. A NewsGator key word search on “Ryan McIntyre” picked up this post by Chan Chaiyochlarb titled If you are going to launch a startup, how many friends would you need?

How Many Founders Does A Startup Need?

I love my NewsGator and Technorati key word search feeds - they help me find the most interesting things. A NewsGator key word search on “Ryan McIntyre” picked up this post by Chan Chaiyochlarb titled If you are going to launch a startup, how many friends would you need?

It’s a neat table of the number of founders for Microsoft, Google Youtube, Yahoo!, Overture, eBay, PayPal, Skype, Kazaa, Hotmail, Ask.com, Excite (where Ryan’s name showed up), Napster, Lycos, Amazon, Apple, MySpace, Facebook, Netscape, AOL, Mirabilis, and Digg. The average number of founders – 2.09.

My first company – Feld Technologies (1987) – had two founders (me and Dave Jilk). The first company I funded as an angel investor (NetGenesis: 1994) had six founders that quickly dropped to four. The second company I funded as an angel investor (Thinkfish: 1994) had four founders. Another early angel deal I did (Harmonix: 1995) had two founders as did Email Publishing (1996). The range from 1994 – 2000 seemed to be solidly between two and four.

I just looked through the companies I’m currently on the board of. The number of founders range from 1 to 4 with a concentration of 2 and 3. The few companies that have single company founders paired up with an experienced entrepreneur as CEO early in their life.

When I look at the list of my successful companies, the distribution is very similar. Lots of two founder companies, a few threes, and a few fours. I can’t think of a success case that I’ve been involved in with greater than four founders (although my partner Ryan can since Excite weighs in as the exception with six.)

Read this article in Brad's blog.

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Article Tags: amazon, angel investor, company founders, digg, ebay, facebook, google, key word search, mirabilis, myspace, napster, netscape aol, newsgator, paypal, ryan mcintyre, single company, skype, successful companies, threes, youtube



Related Forum Posts
Interview Questions - Hi Shri, I have a series of interviews with fast growing entrepreneurs on my website for startup entrepreneurs. It's called If I Were A Startup... I ask each entrepreneur 4 questions: 1) How did the company get started? 2) What advice do you have for new startup entrepreneurs? 3) What mistakes did you make that you would advice others to avoid? 4) If you were starting a new business in a different industry what would it be? These 4 questions tend to generate a lot of discussion and from their responses I'll ask more probing questions. Hope this helps!


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