A Study of 3,526 Companies Shows 1 Decision Makes Startups More Successful. Most Founders Do the Opposite
Surprising new research from NYU and the Wharton School shows that entrepreneurs who start a business on their own are likelier to succeed than those who do so with one or more partners.
That's pretty much the opposite of what most aspiring founders would guess. After all, you can't be good at everything. You might be a marketing expert but not know how to manage cash flow. Or you might good at building great products but bad at setting prices for them. So you team up with someone who's strong in the areas where you're weak, and you start the business together.
This reasoning seems logical, and it's how most people--even experts--see entrepreneurship. In fact, it's such an ingrained belief that VCs and other investors routinely choose to fund companies founded by teams rather than those with a solo founder. But it's also dead wrong. In an intriguing research project, Jason Greenberg of New York University and Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School sent surveys to more than 65,000 businesses launched on Kickstarter over a seven-year period.
More than 10,000 completed the survey. The researchers narrowed their focus to projects seeking a meaningful amount of funding--the kind that could be used to start a real business, and wound up with 3,526 businesses started with either a single founder or two or more partners.
