Common knowledge: investors prefer to back a group of co-founders instead of a single founder. There is some logic to this – the requirements and talents needed to make a new business thrive can be handled by multiple people more easily than by a single person.

But co-founders don’t always out-perform single founders.

– Ali Tamaseb in “Super Founders” found that single founders did better than four or more co-founders.
– [Mollick and Greenberg](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898) (NYU and Wharton) found that single founders last longer and generate more revenue than co-founder teams.

Even though we are familiar with the famous teams (Jobs and Woz) and single founders (take your pick) who succeeded, there are advantages and disadvantages of both: co-founder relationships can be tricky, being a single founder can be lonely.

Bottom line: both single founders and co-founders can succeed and the data show that the difference between them isn’t meaningful.

But, anyone in that position needs support from other people – sometimes co-founders can construct a successful team, and other times single founders can surround themselves with the right people.

Think of what you need your business to do in order to achieve success, and don’t look towards a type of structure as the answer.