Founding Alone or as a Team: What Studies on Founding Teams Show

Alone or with a partner: one of the first decisions of a start-up

Whoever founds a company must decide early whether to do it alone or with others. The decision shapes everything that follows: who decides what, how profits are shared, what happens in a dispute. Later it can only be corrected with effort. Nevertheless, it is often made in passing, out of friendship, out of convenience, or because an investor demands it.

This analysis therefore pursues the question: What do studies show about whether founding teams are more successful than solo founders, and how can a founder tell which path suits them?

To answer it, I first clarify the terms and the situation in Germany, then introduce a model that orders the advantages and disadvantages of co-founders, summarize the most important findings, and weigh two readings. At the end there is a checking scheme for your own decision.

What is a founding team, and how often do people found as a team?

A founding team consists of two or more people who start a company together, hold shares in it, and share its management. A solo founder starts alone and holds the shares alone, even if they involve employees, advisers, or partners early on. What matters is not how many people work along, but who bears ownership and responsibility.

In Germany, solo founding is the norm. According to a preliminary evaluation of the KfW Start-up Monitor, around 690,000 people started a business in 2025. Solo start-ups by a single person accounted for 86 percent, team start-ups for 14 percent. A large share of these are part-time start-ups, which are particularly often founded alone. How such start-ups alongside a job work is covered in the article starting a business on the side.

Research, by contrast, mostly looks at growth-oriented companies, often from the technology sector and with venture capital. There, teams are the rule. Whoever reads studies should therefore check whether the companies examined resemble their own venture. A trade business and a software company with investors face different tasks.

The thinking model: resources and standing against the risk of conflict

Howell and Hall (2026) order the research on co-founders in a simple trade-off. Co-founders bring two advantages. The first is resources, above all knowledge and skills the founder lacks. Whoever can build a product but not sell it needs someone who sells. Because young companies rarely have money for salaries, they often pay for such skills with equity. The second advantage is standing: the fact that someone is willing to tie their fate to the venture is taken by funders and customers as a sign that the idea is viable.

Against this stands one disadvantage: the risk of conflict. People bring different expectations, work attitudes, and ideas. Howell and Hall refer to the entrepreneurship researcher Noam Wasserman, according to whose estimate more than half of failed young companies fail at least partly because of conflicts among co-founders. How such conflicts escalate is described in the article conflicts between business partners.

An everyday analogy helps: a tandem rides faster than a single bicycle on a straight road because two people pedal. In curves it has to agree on who steers. Whoever has never settled who sits in front falls in the first tight curve.

Finding 1: teams do better on average, but not under all conditions

Howell and Hall (2026) tested their trade-off in two studies. The first uses all companies that went through the well-known accelerator program Y Combinator from 2005 to 2022, a very homogeneous group of growth-oriented technology companies. The second uses 67,342 young companies from the Crunchbase database from 2011 to 2020. In both cases, solo founders performed worse on average than teams.

The more important finding concerns the conditions. The solo founders' disadvantage became smaller when they brought broad experience across several functions, such as technology, sales, and finance, or deep experience in one function. It shrank most when both came together. The authors speak of T-shaped skills, a term from Hansen and von Oetinger (2001): the horizontal bar of the T stands for breadth, the vertical one for depth. Such skills were more valuable for solo founders than for founders in a team.

This fits a finding described in the article why young companies fail. Aspelund, Berg-Utby, and Skjevdal (2005) found among 80 technology-based start-ups in Norway and Sweden that founding teams with varied professional experience in different functions failed less often. What the team achieves, then, is above all covering different functions. Whoever brings this breadth themselves needs the partner less.

Finding 2: successful solo founders rarely work alone

Howell, Bingham, and Hendricks (2022) examined 70 young companies, some founded by teams and some alone, asking how solo founders can become as successful as teams. Their answer: successful solo founders deliberately used co-creators instead of co-founders. These are people such as early employees, cooperation partners, or benefactors who contribute skills and resources without receiving equity or a say in ownership. In this way the founders offset disadvantages, kept control, and mobilized resources in unusual ways.

For small businesses this is a familiar form. The owner who leaves the bookkeeping to a tax firm, has an experienced colleague as a mentor, and shares orders with a friendly business is founding alone, but not without support. How a mentor can fill this role is described in the article mentoring for business owners.

The question is rarely whether someone needs help. The question is whether they have to give up ownership for it.

Two readings: teams are better, or teams are riskier

The first reading says: whoever can should found as a team. Teams bring more knowledge, more contacts, and more working capacity, and they appear more resilient to banks and customers. In favor of this are the averages in Howell and Hall and the finding of Aspelund and colleagues. There is also a human reason: the burden of responsibility is spread over several shoulders.

The second reading says: a team is an additional risk that one should only take on if it closes a gap. Every co-founder is a relationship that must last for years, under pressure, with money, and with different life plans. In favor of this are the reference to conflicts as a frequent contributing cause of failure and the meta-analysis by De Dreu and Weingart (2003), according to which not only relationship conflicts but also task conflicts go along with worse team performance on average.

I consider the second reading the more useful starting question, without rejecting the first. The averages favor teams, but averages do not decide one's own case. What matters is whether a co-founder brings skills that the founder neither has nor can buy in through co-creators. If so, the risk of conflict is usually worth it. If not, a partner mainly buys you coordination effort.

When founding as a team: what must be settled beforehand

Whoever decides on a team can reduce the risk of conflict by asking the difficult questions while everyone still gets along. The article what business partners should settle early names six topics for this, from roles and shares to dispute resolution. Two research findings deserve particular attention.

First, the division of equity. Noack, Miller, and Guidice (2021) followed 137 lead founders for a year and found that teams with an unequal split more often got past the start-up phase. This may, however, also be due to which teams choose an equal split. Second, expectations about effort and goals: a partner who sees the business as a life's work and one who wants to sell after five years will argue sooner or later.

• Each co-founder covers at least one core function the other cannot.
• We have written down who makes which decisions alone and which together.
• We know what each of us wants to achieve with the business in five years.
• We have settled what happens in a deadlock, an exit, or a partner's illness.
• We have discussed the shares according to contributions and not split them equally just out of politeness.

The checking scheme: alone, with co-creators, or as a team?

From the findings, a sequence can be derived that helps with the decision. It does not start with the question of whether you like someone, but with the question of what is missing.

1. Check functions

   List the five core functions of your venture and rate which ones you master confidently yourself. That gives you your breadth.

2. Check depth

   Name the one function in which you have years of experience and are better than most. That is your depth.

3. Assign gaps

   For each gap, check whether it can be closed through co-creators: a tax firm, a cooperation partner, an experienced employee, a mentor.

4. Co-founders only for real gaps

   Look for a co-founder only for gaps that are central and cannot be closed any other way, for instance when half of the value creation depends on them.

5. Rules before the start

   If it becomes a team: settle roles, decisions, exit, and shares in writing before money flows.

What follows beyond the individual case, and where the limits are

The studies suggest that the usual advice to look for a co-founder at all costs is too sweeping. It comes from a world in which investors prefer teams and rapid growth is the goal. For the many start-ups in Germany that begin small and remain owner-run for a long time, the question of skills and gaps is more important than the number of founders. Which traits play a role at all is sorted out in the article is there an entrepreneurial personality?.

The limits are clear. The large studies concern technology companies in databases and accelerator programs, not trades or services. Success there is often measured through funding and survival, not through founders' income and satisfaction. The study of 70 companies is qualitative and shows patterns, not frequencies. And Wasserman's estimate on conflicts is an order of magnitude, not a precise measurement.

Conclusion: found alone or as a team?

The question at the start was
founding teams are more successful than solo founders and how a founder can tell which path suits them. The answer is divided. On average teams do better, because co-founders bring resources and standing. But the advantage shrinks when a founder personally combines broad and deep experience, and successful solo founders close their gaps with co-creators instead of co-founders.

For your own decision, the number of founders therefore matters less than the question of which gap a partner closes and whether it could not be closed some other way. For this week, the first step of the checking scheme is enough: write down the five core functions and rate them honestly.

A co-founder is not a remedy for loneliness. They are an answer to a gap, and they are only worth it if that gap exists.