Do Startups Really Need Co-Founders? It Depends on What the Solo Founder Brings

Entrepreneurship has a deeply embedded rule of thumb: do not start alone. Co-founders bring complementary skills, connections, legitimacy, and extra capacity. Some investors and accelerators have even treated solo founding as a reason not to invest.

The data largely supports the concern—but it also reveals important exceptions.

In “Lone genius or lonely fool? Exploring the viability of solo-founding in entrepreneurship,” published in Strategic Management Journal in 2026, Travis Howell and Todd A. Hall examine when solo founders can narrow the performance gap with co-founded ventures. Their answer centers on the founder’s experience—particularly people who combine breadth across functions with depth in at least one domain.

The Research

The authors conduct two complementary studies.

The first analyzes startups that participated in Y Combinator from 2005 through 2022. This setting provides detailed information on founding teams within a relatively homogeneous population of high-tech, growth-oriented ventures.

The second uses a much broader Crunchbase dataset covering 67,342 ventures from 2011 through 2020. The larger sample helps test whether the patterns extend beyond the unusual population of accelerator-backed startups.

Across both datasets, the researchers compare solo-founded and co-founded ventures and examine how the founder’s prior experience changes the solo-founder disadvantage.

Co-Founded Ventures Still Have an Average Advantage

The first result reinforces conventional wisdom. Solo founders perform worse than co-founded ventures on average.

The paper explains why this result is plausible. A new company requires founders to handle diverse tasks: developing the product, understanding the market, raising money, finding customers, and managing stakeholders. One person rarely possesses every required capability or enough time to perform every task well.

Co-founders can fill those human-capital gaps. They can also provide status and credibility to outside evaluators who may view a founding team as a signal that the venture possesses a broader resource base.

But the average does not apply equally to every founder.

Breadth Helps Solo Founders

The researchers find that broad experience across multiple functional domains partially attenuates the solo-founder disadvantage.

A founder who has worked across different functions can bring a wider range of knowledge and capabilities into the company without immediately needing another equity-holding founder to fill every gap. Breadth therefore substitutes for some of the resource diversity a co-founder would otherwise provide.

This does not eliminate the average disadvantage, but it reduces it.

Depth Helps Too

Deep experience within a particular functional domain also partially narrows the gap.

Depth can provide strong specialized human capital and credibility. A founder with substantial expertise in a core domain may be better positioned to execute critical tasks and to signal competence to external stakeholders.

Again, the evidence does not show that deep expertise makes co-founders irrelevant. It shows that solo founders with stronger human capital do not face the same degree of disadvantage as solo founders without it.

The Most Interesting Profile Is T-Shaped

The authors also examine founders who combine broad and deep experience—a profile commonly described as “T-shaped.”

These founders possess depth in one area while also having experience across multiple functional domains. The study finds that T-shaped skills are more valuable for people who become solo founders than for people who become co-founders and help attenuate the solo-founder disadvantage.

The logic is intuitive. A solo founder cannot rely on another founder to supply missing expertise at the top of the organization. A combination of specialization and cross-functional range can therefore be especially valuable when one person must integrate many early-stage responsibilities.

What Entrepreneurs Should Do Differently

Investors Should Look Beyond Founder Count

The findings also matter for investors, accelerators, and other entrepreneurial gatekeepers. Policies that categorically screen out solo founders may ignore meaningful heterogeneity in founder human capital.

The research does not show that a solo founder with broad or deep experience becomes identical to a strong founding team. It shows that the expected disadvantage is smaller for some solo founders than for others.

The Takeaway

Howell and Hall’s research offers a more nuanced answer to the founding-team question. On average, co-founders remain an advantage. They bring resources and status that one entrepreneur may struggle to replicate.

But solo founding is not equally risky for everyone. Founders with broad experience, deep expertise, and especially T-shaped combinations of both can move closer to the performance of co-founded ventures.

The practical question is therefore not simply, “Do I have a co-founder?” It is, “What does a co-founder need to add that I cannot already bring—and is that value worth the interpersonal and ownership complexity that comes with the partnership?”