Please don't get me wrong. I have huge respect and admiration for what you and YC are doing. I wish resources like YC had been available when I was first infected with the entrepreneurial bug. That was a different time.

I think, in general terms, it might be interesting to have access to data well outside of YC and similar tech incubators. I wonder what it might look like if we included all manner of businesses, from gas stations to bakeries and, yes, tech?

In that case I would suspect that success or failure might correlate to factors other than the number of founders.

Now, this is going to sound weird because I will agree with you: In tech the probability of success should increase with more founders (to a limit).

I'll qualify this by saying that it has to be the right founders. They can't be clones. They have to bring something different to the table.

In my opinion, the same could be achieved --to a point-- with a single founder and really good initial hires.

The reason I say this is that a tech startup, particularly today, might have to cover so many disciplines that it is nearly impossible to find all of this in one person. And you probably wouldn't want to, even if you did find this person, at least not for the long haul. So, a good founding team or a good single founder and a solid hired-in team is almost mandatory.

My own experience has been, well, maybe "unique" is the word. While my training was in electrical engineering over the years I've had to learn a number of engineering disciplines on my own due to the various directions that life (and my own curiosity) led me through. I became a mechanical engineer, software engineer, embedded engineer, learned FPGA's (they didn't exist when I went to school), learned metal and plastics manufacturing and even became a decent salesman. All the while, when it was possible, I'd find people to replace me in certain functions. Finding good people wasn't the easiest part of my job.

This is where finding good teams fresh out of school makes a lot of sense. And this is probably why the success rate falls off quickly as you get farther away from places like Stanford.

We probably agree.

I think what touches people the wrong way might be that your data seems to be used to create bias against single-founder ventures and this has to some extent permeated the industry.

It is probably 100x harder to get funded as a single founder. Perhaps single-founders have to settle for lower levels of funding, lower quality deals and less support (I am not talking about YC here, just a general statement) and, with lower funding comes a far greater probability of failure.

In my prior post I mentioned self-funding my first startup to the tune of $250K. What I did not mention is that I was grossly under-funded and just did not know it at the time due to my lack of experience in the segment. This was a hardware/software/manufacturing startup and $250K was nowhere near what I needed. I probably needed two million to do it right. I would end-up having to go and hustle for more money during the first year by consulting and doing projects just to be able to keep going. I burned through that cash very quickly, almost before I left my garage. And it was just me! I never had enough money. It was a real struggle. At some level, the only reason I did not fail was because --cliche alarm-- failure was not really an option.

So, yes, I think that for the most part I am in agreement with your position. I have the scars to prove just how tough it can be. It probably would have been far smarter to go find outside money and build a team. I just wasn't wired that way and, frankly, the option wasn't even on my radar.