Do startups really need a cofounder ?
A lot of startup advice makes it sound like having a cofounder is almost mandatory.
“Don’t build alone.”
“Find someone who complements you.”
“Investors prefer teams.”
“Solo founders move too slowly.”
And honestly, I understand why.
A great cofounder can make everything easier: building, selling, thinking, staying sane, making decisions, surviving the bad weeks.
Personally my cofounder is my amazing Moroccan cousin Omar and our CTO :)
But I also think people underestimate the opposite:
A bad cofounder can slow you down more than being solo ever would.
Misaligned ambition, different work ethics, unclear ownership, ego, poor communication…
That can kill a startup before the market even gets a chance to reject it.
So I’m curious:
Do early-stage startups really need a cofounder?
Or is being solo better than forcing the wrong partnership just because “startups need teams”?
Would love to hear from both sides: solo founders and cofounder teams.
Replies
Solo here, running Oshylabs across a handful of products while working full time. The tradeoff nobody mentions enough is decision speed. No one to argue against, no one to catch what I miss either. So I've had to build the catching into process rather than a person, a written spec before anything touches billing or data deletion, numbers checked against the live site before I ever quote them anywhere. A good cofounder replaces some of that instinctively. Solo just means you have to build the discipline on purpose instead of getting it for free.