While the founder tries to seek the truth
Ever tried starting something of your own? If no then you may skip reading this piece. Else continue.
There are a number of reasons to find a cofounder if you want to start up something. Your initiative will have more than just two hands, your skill set is diversified, investors can trust you better, you can support each other in tough times, blah. blah. This is what the usual blogs bullshit about. One can always overcome these mere things if you are confident about your plan and avoid the pretty useless short cuts.
So the question still stands: Does one need a cofounder?
The answer is: Yes.
The reason lies with absurdism, a school of philosophy lovingly made popular by Albert Camus.
Absurdism essentially refers to the conflict existing between the men seeking the meaning of life and the inability of finding any. In early entrepreneurship there exists a similar arrangement. There is a conflict between the founder's idea of the ideal user/market and the inability to achieve exactly that. Such a situation has to be balanced rather than absolutely solved.
The idea need to be materialized into a product. This product will try to manipulate the market to behave according to its metrics. The market in turn will behave somewhat differently and then the whole cycle enters into an indefinite circle. This is essentially the product or the tech or the design or call it whatsoever.
At the other side lies the finance. It believes in getting things done than seeking truths. In more practical sense it refers to the external side of a startup. It may refer to raising funds to make sure the employees are paid well to not quit for your competitors, or actually selling the product and bringing revenue. Here you have the pleasure to manipulate the market. You may super lower your costs beating basic economic concepts, foodtech startups like Foodpanda, Tinyowl etc tried doing it before getting fucked up. Or you may try to manipulate the market behavior with anti economic concepts, Reliance Jio did a fabulous job by giving free data to its customers for six months. Or you may become one of those evil capitalists which Raghuram Rajan warned us against, like the Indian banking or the health care or the education industries which perform more like a nexus and less like a free market.
The product side will want you to seek truth, behave like an artist and embrace data. The business side will give you the power to manipulate the market according to your plans. And in the long term you just want to survive.
This gives rise to two forces opposite in nature. And having a cofounder will help you to neither deny the existence of this absurdism nor become an evil to exploit the easier of the forces.
And you may still claim that you can always overcome these mere things if you are confident about your plan and avoid the pretty useless short cuts.
There are a number of reasons to find a cofounder if you want to start up something. Your initiative will have more than just two hands, your skill set is diversified, investors can trust you better, you can support each other in tough times, blah. blah. This is what the usual blogs bullshit about. One can always overcome these mere things if you are confident about your plan and avoid the pretty useless short cuts.
So the question still stands: Does one need a cofounder?
The answer is: Yes.
The reason lies with absurdism, a school of philosophy lovingly made popular by Albert Camus.
Absurdism essentially refers to the conflict existing between the men seeking the meaning of life and the inability of finding any. In early entrepreneurship there exists a similar arrangement. There is a conflict between the founder's idea of the ideal user/market and the inability to achieve exactly that. Such a situation has to be balanced rather than absolutely solved.
The idea need to be materialized into a product. This product will try to manipulate the market to behave according to its metrics. The market in turn will behave somewhat differently and then the whole cycle enters into an indefinite circle. This is essentially the product or the tech or the design or call it whatsoever.
At the other side lies the finance. It believes in getting things done than seeking truths. In more practical sense it refers to the external side of a startup. It may refer to raising funds to make sure the employees are paid well to not quit for your competitors, or actually selling the product and bringing revenue. Here you have the pleasure to manipulate the market. You may super lower your costs beating basic economic concepts, foodtech startups like Foodpanda, Tinyowl etc tried doing it before getting fucked up. Or you may try to manipulate the market behavior with anti economic concepts, Reliance Jio did a fabulous job by giving free data to its customers for six months. Or you may become one of those evil capitalists which Raghuram Rajan warned us against, like the Indian banking or the health care or the education industries which perform more like a nexus and less like a free market.
The product side will want you to seek truth, behave like an artist and embrace data. The business side will give you the power to manipulate the market according to your plans. And in the long term you just want to survive.
This gives rise to two forces opposite in nature. And having a cofounder will help you to neither deny the existence of this absurdism nor become an evil to exploit the easier of the forces.
And you may still claim that you can always overcome these mere things if you are confident about your plan and avoid the pretty useless short cuts.
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