Confirmed - you must have a startup cofounder to succeed.
Well, not in SaaS. And certainly not required in Consumer. Also maybe a grey area for Healthtech...you get the picture.
The debate around whether startup founders 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 cofounders has obscured the fact that founding teams of all sizes have found success over the past decade.
Graphic below shows the distribution of founding team size in 5 major startup sectors, for pre-seed through Series C companies. Single founder teams in the coral green on the left, 4+ founder teams in the dark navy on the right.
More than 18,000 companies included in the results, all currently live on Carta.
𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀
Solo founders run about 27% of companies on Carta (that figure drops to 20% if you exclude pre-seed).
The high share of solo founders in pre-seed suggests that many companies take on another founder in the process leading up to their first priced round.
It's true that solo founders make up a smaller portion of companies at later stages, basically across all industries.
Consumer has the highest sustained share of solo founders.
Biotech is the only industry of the 5 where founding teams of 3+ people are more common then their smaller counterparts.
Across most industries, 2-founder teams are the most common arrangement.
What does this all mean?
My instinct is that there aren't many overly strong conclusions to be drawn. It could be that companies in Series C are more likely to see larger founding teams because that was in vogue back when they were getting started ~6-7 years ago.
It could be that it really is more difficult to succeed without a cofounder for all the normally stated reasons (complementary skills, stress dispersion, etc).
It does seem to be true that hard sciences and business dealing in manufacturing tend towards larger founding teams, whether by design or necessity.
But overall on Carta, 15% of Series D companies are currently run by solo founders. It's a viable path.
Last note - there were a number of 5-founder and 6-founder companies in the analysis. But major shoutout to the 7 companies with 10+ founders in our study - not sure how you decide on anything, but more power to you!
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#cartadata #startups #founders #cofounders #saas
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