You don’t need a co-founder. Just be a solo founder. It’s easy, and it’s great.
But, as always, it depends. On what?
It depends on you.
My point is that the whole discussion of solo founding vs. co-founding is not a very rational one – sure, people online are shouting at each other that one thing is supposedly better than the other. But, in the end, none of that matters.
You have to pick what works for you. Becoming a solo founder is very suitable for some people, others will need a co-founder.
Where does that leave you? I’ll try to help you find out, and for that, I’ll tell you my story.
I founded OpenRegulatory as a solo founder in 2020. The company was profitable from day one, zero investors, 100% owned by me, with a team of five people as of right now, in 2025.
At the time, founding it by myself just felt right. As time passed, I noticed that this wasn’t a coincidence.
Group Work
Remember group work in school?
Those situations where the teacher would come up with a rather arbitrary and mostly useless task which the students would then have to work on in groups of 5.
I was rather introverted. I had a hard time in group work. But not because of being introverted. Instead, something else would happen: Usually, within the first few minutes, one of the more extroverted students would start “managing” the group, prioritizing tasks, delegating them, acting important, etc.. In parallel, also usually within the first few minutes, I would conclude that this extroverted student person was incompetent at managing the group. But the problem was that I wasn’t willing to step up and take over. After all, I was introverted.
So I would quietly resign to do the minimum work required and observe, mostly as a spectator, how the group project would fail spectacularly.
To be fair, most group projects fail spectacularly – not only in school, but in life. The Berlin Airport reminds me of that every time I travel.
But here’s my point: I just couldn’t work with others.
But why?
- I didn’t have ownership of the project.
- I didn’t have control over the project.
- I didn’t think the other team members were competent.
It took me quite a while to find this out. Another story!
Working In a Research Group
The first time in modern history in which I was apparently able to work with others (without quietly resigning) was while doing my doctorate thesis in a research group at the University Hospital. The day-to-day work entailed me sitting in a room with no windows, writing Matlab code.
While, to an outsider, that might not sound particularly enticing, I had an awesome time.
But why?
My research group leader was an extremely smart person. I looked up to him. I thought he was competent.
Also, I had full control over the project – I could just go off in any research direction I wanted.
Finally, I had full ownership – whatever I found out, I would be able to publish it under my own name.
All the criteria were fulfilled. It was a very productive and fun time.
And then there was the time when a friend and I built an app in a weekend.
The Weekend Wanking App
My research work led me to re-discover my love of coding. Now I wanted to code more, and was in search of ideas.
A good friend came over for a long weekend. Being disorganized students, as always, we had made zero plans of what to do. Sitting around my tiny student flat, looking like characters in “The Sims” waiting for someone assigning them a task, I blurted out “hey, let’s build an app”. And he was like “hell yeah”. So we built an app.
The very obvious app idea was to build an app for people to track their masturbation behavior (we called it “NofApp” because the research hypothesis was that wanking less would lead to increased mood, energy and libido (??)).
We didn’t sleep for two nights and built it in a weekend. It was live in the Google Play Store on Sunday.
Now, 10 years later (damn), we fondly refer to this time as “the most productive we’ve ever been”.
We worked well together.
But why?
My friend was a way better coder than I was – I thought he was competent.
We were both building something we really wanted to build, giving us control.
And finally, the result of our work, the NofApp app, would be uploaded under our own account, giving us ownership.
Yeah man. Those were the times.
Solo Founder vs. Co-Founder
So now you might be thoroughly confused. First, I mentioned that I’m a solo founder. Then, I went on to tell stories in which I was actually able to work with other people. Where does this leave us?
This leaves us with the conclusion that I prefer to be a solo founder.
Wait, what?
My requirements are competent people, control and ownership.
Some scenarios fulfilled these requirements.
Co-founding a company does not.
That’s because I’d be giving up too much control and ownership.
Third and final story to illustrate my point.
The OpenRegulatory Bonus Discussion
At OpenRegulatory, we have very open discussions about everything – so open that, in fact, people are quite happy to criticize me, the founder and CEO, without facing any sort of “political” backlash or whatever. I remember coming to one of these discussions with a smart (or so I thought) new concept for our SaaS pricing, and the first thing one of our software engineers said was that my model didn’t make a whole lot of sense and that our customers would not like it.
This was just another day at the office at our company, and the people didn’t even perceive this as very spectacular (while, in fact, it actually was, and still is).
These discussions are usually inherently democratic: Everyone voices their opinion. The discussion may become heated, but it never becomes personal. After a while, the best path forward becomes apparent to everyone. We’re a small company, so this best path forward usually equals the democratic consensus with which everyone’s agrees.
In many of these big discussions, I prefer to voice my opinion last, because often my opinion becomes irrelevant anyway as someone else might have already mentioned similar points, and the discussion therefore no longer needs my redundant contribution. In those cases, I simply remain quiet, accept the consensus which emerged without me, we make the decision and move on.
Those are around 95% of our decisions.
But this story is about the other 5%.
Sometimes, in very rare cases, the consensus of the team strongly mismatches with what my personal opinion. This has only happened once since 2020.
Then, I have the control to override the consensus – making the final call.
This mattered when we recently, in 2024, discussed revising our bonus scheme.
In short, at OpenRegulatory, we have a 25% profit share. This means that 25% of the yearly profits are distributed among the team members. The discussion came up whether to raise this percentage to 30%. Most people were neutral, while one person was strongly in favor. The consensus, therefore, would have tilted towards raising the percentage to 30%.
I made the final call not to do it. In my opinion, 1) 25% profit share is already way above industry average, 2) going higher is not viable for a sustainable business and 3) my personal limit is 25%.
End of discussion.
95% of discussions are democratic. The other 5% are not.
Later, over beers, a team member told me the company has traits of a “benevolent dictatorship which looks like a democracy”. He meant this in a good way – a bit like people refer to Singapore as a well-managed country which people like to live in, while it can’t be described as fully democratic.
I agreed. It’s my company. I choose to run it democratically, but I also choose when to intervene and make the final call. This gives me control.
And that is very important for me.
That’s why I’m a solo founder.
How about you?
Reflecting on my thoughts above, there’s now a bunch of tangents we can go down. The elephant in the room surely is whether it’s a good idea to run a company as a benevolent dictatorship which looks like a democracy.
I’d like to hypothesize that it has many good and many bad traits which are inseparable – it comes as a package, if you’d call it that.
The glaring bad trait is that this system fails spectacularly if the dictator goes crazy and starts using their power to make terrible decisions.
But there are many good traits, too, which are often overlooked. The inherent fact that the benevolent-dictatorship-democracy exists because there is one person with very strong opinions does enable a company to do things in a very unconventional ways – ways which wouldn’t necessarily emerge as democratic consensus.
Such as:
- Having transparent salaries, an open bank account and transparent financial statements
- Not using Slack
- Not tracking work hours and trusting people to get their work done in however many (or few) hours per day
So yeah. The wheat comes with the chaff, or whatever an American would say.
End of tangent.
One final story about the nice people at my University.
The Nice People At University
There was a group of friends at my University which I called the Nice People. That’s because, you guessed it, they all were so nice.
Those were the sort of people who were hanging out together all the time. They organized all these nice social activities which introverted nerds like me generally categorize as “pointless”. Like traveling to a shoe outlet store to shop for cheap shoes (we ended up not buying shoes – pointless).
But they were really nice. For a while, I became friends with them.
I’m not even sure whether they were all friends, because their group consisted of like 30 people who would just regularly meet up, but individual people weren’t close to each other at all. Sometimes, when someone was missing at a meetup, people would be like “oh, where’s Chris by the way? Ah, he just got dumped by his girlfriend and he’s depressed” – like, what the hell? Are you even friends?
But that’s besides the point.
The point is that, with time, I learned that the Nice People weren’t good at being alone. They always had to meet up! And when they weren’t meeting up, they were living together as flat mates. And when living together as flat mates, they always had to hang around the common kitchen and hang out or whatever these people do.
All of this sounds very tiring to me.
I prefer to be alone.
I prefer to be a solo founder.
Also, I don’t want anyone to mess up my kitchen.
How about you?
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