Everyone told me the same thing before my second company: find a cofounder who complements your skill set. So I did. It's the biggest professional mistake I've made.
The advice isn't wrong because cofounders are bad. It's wrong because of what it skips. "Complementary skills" is a hiring brief. It says nothing about whether two people can survive a bad quarter together, disagree without one of you folding, or want the same thing in year five. I filled a gap in my skill set and opened one in everything that actually kills companies: trust, pace, and what we were building toward. My first company, the one everyone called me reckless for running alone, was harder in plenty of ways. But there was far less friction. The only real gap back then was that I couldn't code, and everything else I could learn.
The data agrees with the version of me that ran solo. Greenberg and Mollick studied 3,526 ventures and found solo founders 2.6 times more likely to still be running the company than teams of three or more. Noam Wasserman puts people problems, mostly cofounder conflict, behind roughly two-thirds of startup collapses. Not the market. Not the money. Meanwhile solo founding has doubled in a decade, up to 36% of startups incorporated on Carta last year. The AI tools did that. You don't need three people to build, ship and sell anymore.
Here's what should worry anyone about to take the advice I took. It's closer to a marriage than a hire, under far more financial pressure, with none of the infrastructure a marriage has for working through conflict. That's why I'm going solo this time. Not because it's easier, but because when I need a skill I don't have (hint hint, social media), I'd rather learn it than negotiate for it. A cofounder is not a feature you add to cover a weakness.
🎵 Moby — Porcelain Moby wrote, played and mixed all of Play alone in a twelve-foot room on second-hand gear. Nobody to negotiate with.
— Nicc