Solo founder or cofounder? How to decide before you start looking

Advice on this question tends to arrive as a rule. Investors say get a cofounder; people who built alone say you don't need one. Both sides can point to studies. The studies measure different things in different groups of companies, so they don't settle it, but they do show where a cofounder makes a difference and where it doesn't.

This post is for people deciding whether to start looking. It covers what the research says, when going alone tends to work, and a set of questions to answer before you decide.

How common is it to start a company alone?

More common every year. Carta, whose software many US startups use to manage their shareholdings, found that the share of new startups with a solo founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025 (Carta Solo Founders Report 2025). Its Founder Ownership Report 2026 puts the share at about 36% of startups founded in 2025, up from 31% in 2024 (Carta).

Peter Walker, who runs Carta's insights team, called it "a 13-point rise in about five years". Carta's report suggests several possible causes: AI tools let one person get more done, well-known solo-led companies have made the model more acceptable to investors, and some founders simply want creative control.

Carta's reports cut the data differently from year to year, so the figure for the same year varies by a few points between reports. The direction doesn't.

What the research says

The studies below are the ones we could trace to their original publisher. Each covers a different group of companies, which explains most of the disagreement between them.

Where teams come out ahead: money and scale

If you plan to raise venture capital, the data points one way. In Carta's 2025 report, solo founders were 35% of startups incorporated in 2024 but only 17% of those that closed a venture round before the year ended (Carta). Its Solo Founders Report found that solo-led companies were 30% of 2024 startups but received 14.7% of the cash raised in priced rounds that year, though it also notes that the share going to solo founders is growing.

First Round Capital, looking back at its first ten years of investments in 2015, found that teams with more than one founder outperformed solo founders by 163%, and that solo founders' seed valuations were 25% lower (First Round, 10 Year Project). First Round says plainly that its data isn't representative of the industry or even statistically significant: it's one firm's portfolio.

Part of this gap may come from investors themselves. If most of them prefer teams, solo founders raise less whether or not they'd have done worse with the money.

Teams may also reach scale sooner. The 2011 Startup Genome Report found that solo founders took 3.6 times longer to reach the scale stage than teams of two, and were 2.3 times less likely to pivot (Startup Genome). The data is 15 years old and self-reported.

Where solo founders hold their own: survival, hiring and big exits

Jason Greenberg of NYU Stern and Ethan Mollick of Wharton studied ventures funded on Kickstarter between 2009 and 2015 that went on to become businesses. Solo founders were 55% less likely to dissolve their businesses than teams of three, and solo-founded for-profits were about 2.5 times as likely to survive as team-founded ones. Among nonprofits it reversed: teams were about twice as likely to survive (NYU Stern).

These were mostly smaller, crowdfunded companies, not venture-backed startups. That's the point, though: for a business that grows from its own customers, the case for a team is weaker than investor data suggests.

Carta's data also shows one way solo founders move faster: they hire their first employee sooner, at a median of 399 days after incorporation against 480 for companies with several founders. A solo founder who needs help tends to hire it.

Large exits don't clearly favour teams either. Haje Jan Kamps analysed Crunchbase data for TechCrunch in 2016. Of 7,348 companies that had raised more than $10 million, almost half had a single founder; of 6,191 companies that had been acquired or gone public, more than half did (TechCrunch). He called his measures of success "slightly arbitrary", and Crunchbase doesn't always list every founder, which may overstate the solo share.

Ali Tamaseb, who studied more than 200 billion-dollar startups for his book *Super Founders*, told TechCrunch that 20% of founders in both his unicorn group and his comparison group were solo founders (TechCrunch). Founder count didn't separate the two groups.

What a cofounder can cost

A cofounder can also leave. In Carta's 2025 report, fewer than 25% of two-founder teams split up in the first four years, and more than 60% were still together after eight. First-year splits, though rare, rose from 4% in 2015 to 7.5% in 2024. Carta counts only companies still operating, so splits that ended the company don't appear.

When a founder does leave, it hurts. A 2019 US Census Bureau working paper by Joonkyu Choi, Nathan Goldschlag, John Haltiwanger and J. Daniel Kim looked at founding team members who died unexpectedly, a departure nobody chose. The loss had a "persistently large, negative" effect on the company's size and survival, and the effect was strongest in small teams (US Census Bureau). A two-person team depends heavily on both people.

When going solo works

Two conditions come up again and again when solo founders do well.

You cover both building and selling. The gap a cofounder usually fills is the half of the work you can't do: building if you sell, selling if you build. If you can already build the product and find its first customers yourself, that gap is much smaller, and the remaining work can often be bought or borrowed.

You build a circle of people around you. Travis Howell, Christopher Bingham and Bradley Hendricks studied 70 new ventures for a 2022 paper in *Organization Science*. They found that "successful solo founders strategically use a set of cocreators rather than cofounders": advisers, early employees, contractors and partners who fill gaps without joining as founders (IDEAS/RePEc).

Going alone also suits some kinds of company better than others:

• A business that grows from revenue rather than investor money.
• A product one person can build and support, such as a focused software tool or a small online business.
• A company where you want to keep every decision.

When a cofounder makes the difference

• You plan to raise venture money soon. Every Carta dataset above shows teams over-represented among the startups that raise.
• The work needs two deep skills. The 2011 Startup Genome Report found teams with one technical and one business founder raised 30% more money and grew users 2.9 times faster than teams with only one kind of founder.
• The road to revenue is long. Carta found that research-heavy companies making physical products tend to start with larger founding teams than software companies. In biotech, only 35% of new startups have one or two founders and 37% have four or five; in edtech, 58% have one or two.
• You'd stall without someone to answer to. No study we found measures this, so it comes down to knowing yourself. Think about whether you've kept going on long projects when nobody was waiting on you.

Six questions to decide

Answer these in writing. If your answers keep pointing one way, that's your decision.

1. Which can you do to a professional standard: build the product, or sell it? If only one, who covers the other for the next 18 months? 2. Will you raise from investors in the next year or two? If yes, the funding data argues for a team. 3. How long until the product earns money? Months favours going alone; years favours a team. 4. Who will you argue with? A solo founder still needs people who'll say they're wrong. Name your advisers, early hires or peers. 5. What happens if you're out of action for a month? If the answer is that the company stops, decide whether you can accept that risk. 6. Would working with a partner make you better or slower? Some people do their best work alone; others drift without a partner. Think about your past projects, not how you'd like to work.

The middle paths

The choice isn't permanent. Many founders start alone and keep looking, which has a side benefit: a working product, early customers or a waiting list make it far easier to attract a strong cofounder later.

Others build the circle of cocreators the research describes: a part-time adviser with the skill they lack, a contractor, an early first hire. And if you've met someone promising, you can work on a project together for a few weeks before either of you calls it a partnership.

If you decide to look

Skills are the easy part to check. Hours, pace, ambition and how each of you handles disagreement are much harder to see in a first call, and they decide whether a partnership lasts.

On Foundinity, you state what you need in a cofounder, and answer an assessment about how you work: commitment, working style, ambition, personality, goals, values, alongside your skills and interests. A multi-trait algorithm built on established psychological compatibility models ranks the people you see, so the people you meet are compatible on more than a skill set. Every match shows where the two of you align and where you differ, so the first call can start with the differences. When you match, a 10-day clock starts and you can book the intro call in the app. Your profile is visible only to compatible members, and an "exploring" status lets you look before you've fully decided. It's free to get started; Plus is $5 a week or $15 a month. See how it works.

For the rest of the search, our guide on how to find a cofounder covers where to look and how to test a match, questions to ask a potential cofounder gives you 20 to start with, and how long it takes to find a cofounder sets expectations for the timeline.