Solo founders hit 19% of YC as knowing what to build matters most

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 29:28

   there might be in their late 30s, 40s, even 50s. I mean, there's a sort of resurgence of the experienced founder. A lot of people seem to say that they want to be YC for solo founders, but it turns out YC is the YC for solo founders. Diana, you have a few stats that you found surprising. One of the shocking stats from analyzing the septic companies from a year ago, we used to only have about 5% of the companies accepted be solo founders. And now we're over 18, 19%, which is a huge, this is the highest spike that we've seen.

2. 30:04

   Almost one fifth of the batch. So, and it seems like it's going to keep going. You know, before you had, you had to have like, you know, so many different skills. You had to be a great hustler, you know, you had to be able to explain. And, you know, we would say, like, they have to be good talkers, right? Like, you need someone who can, you know, be a hot person, someone who can actually come in and convince someone of something. And then if you paired that with someone who is a world class technologist, that's sort of the combo that is so ideal. And so classically, you would need co founders to do that, like, you know, any it, you didn't necessarily need one, but like, it would increase your chances by so, so much.

3. 30:43

   And I feel like a lot of that is like changing to this degree. It's becoming such that like knowing what to prompt and knowing what to build is so much more difficult and valuable than just knowing, you know, the CTO being able to code the thing. I think what's going on is that we've always actually had hugely successful single founders. I think people don't realize this about YC. There's different sort of definitions of it.

4. 31:08

   But for all intents and purposes, Apuva with Instacart, Brian Armstrong with Coinbase, at least when the batch started, we're single founders. Yeah, Parker Conrad got into YC as a single founder. And then I interviewed Lakshirini, who ended up being his CTO. the bar for being able to like have the idea be able to sell it and be able to build it all by yourself which is really really high um and that's actually totally doable yeah i think that's what's in that case like those three are just like incredibly exceptional people and so just like very very few people who are capable of that and now you can actually like get going and so i think you just don't have to be quite that like exceptional at least on one of those dimensions the building part to be able to get going but net net it's still valuable to have co-founders

5. 31:52

   It's still a measure of like, you know, if your co-founders are super elite, like that means you're probably super elite and it just increases the chance of. In each of those cases, they did bring on co-founders. I think in each of those cases, you just get going and they got traction and they added on co-founders sort of at a certain point. And so maybe like the equity ownership is different or maybe the dynamic is just slightly different to the traditional way. Like you start out and like the two of you in a room and you're completely 50-50. I don't know if you want to put the equity stuff in.

6. 32:23

   but yeah i don't have the stats but i have definitely seen a greater trend towards that people adding co-founders later in the company life cycle after the thing has already like gotten off the ground i think that will be the trend i think we'll see a lot like more single founders in the battle you're already seeing like starting the batch but at least of the things that succeed i still expect that they're going to be adding co-founders as the company progresses gary do you also want to talk about the trend towards like more experienced people starting companies? So it does seem like people who have been around the block