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Comment by modi15 | Hacker News Reader

Broadly disagree with ALL the points, except for the first one.

IMO this happens with a LOT of standard advice regarding startups. The problem is that there are as many ways to do a startup as there are founders and its too tempting for VC's to infer 'wisdom' from their immediate samples.

I suspect that this happens because as an observer its extremely hard to distinguish causation from correlation. Also, it seems that VC's tend to view 'emergent' success in terms of their own work ethics.

Sam's not the only one though. Paul Graham did this too with his two founder rule for startups.

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From an investor point of view, correlation can be good enough. If startups with property X are measurably more likely to succeed, it doesn't matter whether X causes success or if X is caused by some other property Y of the startup that causes success but isn't easy to determine in an interview.

In your example, X = "has multiple founders", Y = "first founder is not impossible to work with". Clearly Y causes success, but X is easier for investors to determine.

From a founder point of view, you want to focus mainly on the real causes of success rather than appearances, but give some thought to appearances. Customers are far more influenced by appearances than investors (because they have less time to dig in), so when you devote time to appearances you should think mainly about customers. Customers tend to be skeptical of one-man shows.

The concern is that Sam is offering this advice for founders not investors - and many would lap it up given the authority he has and make suboptimal decisions about their startup.

I think YC is probably HEAVILY influenced by appearance. Wrestle with the data little bit, check all the right boxes, prep that video, get some intros and your YC MBA is set.

Customers largely couldnt care less about one-man shows and even if in any specific case they do, it is very easy to 'look' like a company on the internet or in real life.

Amazon has always been a one-man show - but maybe thats why they never made money.

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