You know the old saying: If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. I believe this is more than true in building companies from the ground up.
Starting a business is often portrayed as a solo pursuit: one person has an idea, takes the risk, builds the product, finds the customers, raises the money, and eventually builds a company around it. But the data increasingly suggests that entrepreneurship is not necessarily a game where doing everything yourself is an advantage. In fact, research comparing solo-founded companies with founding teams has found meaningful advantages for teams. A study of 1,291 equity crowdfunding campaigns found that solo-founded ventures were less likely to successfully raise their initial funding and were more likely to fail afterward than ventures with founding teams. The researchers found that, on average, being a solo founder reduced the likelihood of initial success by roughly 14% compared with otherwise similar companies with founder teams.
One reason a cofounder can make such a difference is simple: no founder is good at everything. Early-stage companies require product development, sales, marketing, customer research, operations, fundraising, hiring, finance, and countless decisions that have to be made with incomplete information. A strong cofounder adds another set of skills and experiences to that equation. Research on innovative startups has found that characteristics of the founding team are associated with early company performance, while other research has found that combining different types of founder experience can improve startup survival by giving the company access to a broader base of knowledge and capabilities.
Perhaps even more important, a cofounder gives entrepreneurs someone with whom they can challenge their own assumptions. Founders are naturally attached to their ideas. That attachment can make it difficult to recognize when customers are telling you that your original plan is wrong. Customer discovery exists specifically to combat this problem: entrepreneurs form hypotheses, talk to customers and other stakeholders, and use the evidence to validate or invalidate those assumptions. The goal isn’t to prove that the founder’s original idea is right; it is to discover what is actually true about the market.
Having two founders can make that learning process considerably more effective. One founder may hear a customer say, “I wouldn’t pay for that,” and interpret it as a pricing problem. The other might recognize that the customer actually doesn’t have the underlying problem at all. One founder might become excited about a new feature because three customers asked for it, while the other asks whether those customers represent the broader market. This second perspective creates a healthy form of friction. Instead of immediately reacting to every piece of feedback, the team can discuss what the feedback actually means and decide what should be tested next.
That matters because customer discovery frequently leads to changes in the business itself. A startup may begin with one target customer, discover that another customer has a much more urgent problem, and change its product or business model accordingly. In other cases, customer interviews reveal that the original problem is real but the proposed solution is wrong. Research on entrepreneurial customer interaction has found that interacting with customers can improve venture performance, in part by helping entrepreneurs modify their initial concepts beyond their own biases. Customer discovery is therefore not simply a marketing exercise; it is a mechanism for learning what business should be built.
This is where the ability to pivot becomes especially important. Startup Genome’s research found that solo founders took 3.6 times longer to reach the scale stage than two-person founding teams and were 2.3 times less likely to pivot. The same research found that startups that pivoted once or twice raised 2.5 times more money, experienced 3.6 times better user growth, and were 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that either pivoted more than twice or did not pivot at all. While these figures do not prove that having a cofounder directly causes better outcomes, they illustrate an important relationship: the ability to recognize when something isn’t working and change course is a critical startup capability.
More recent research helps explain why teams can be particularly valuable during a pivot. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Business Venturing followed seven founding teams and examined how they made sense of feedback while developing their ventures. The researchers found that teams with overlapping responsibilities were able to combine different ways of interpreting information, which gave them greater flexibility to pivot when necessary while still knowing when to persevere. The researchers describe pivoting as emerging from the combination of different team members’ understandings of the venture. In other words, a cofounder isn’t simply another person doing work; they can change how the company interprets what it is learning.
Ultimately, the case for a cofounder is not that two people are automatically better than one. A poorly matched cofounder can create conflict, slow decisions, and make a company worse. The advantage comes from having the right cofounder: someone who brings complementary skills, challenges assumptions, contributes another network and perspective, and is willing to change direction when the evidence demands it. The strongest startups are not necessarily the ones whose founders had the best idea on day one. They are often the ones capable of learning faster than everyone else. A great cofounder can make that learning process faster, broader, and more honest and in an environment where the original business model is almost guaranteed to change, that can be one of the company’s greatest competitive advantages.