So does being a solo founder … work in SaaS?
We’ve dug into this topic several times at SaaStr.
Of the post ~40 SaaS IPOs, only 5 or so had solo co-founders. So let’s call that 10%-12% or so. Still, they are some good ones: Zoom, Scaler, New Relic, Elastic, etc.
More on that here:
But that’s of SaaS and Cloud companies that IPO’d. What about across all start-ups, and what about bootstrapped start-ups that have to be scrappier for longer?
The data is interesting. Overall, 17% have a solo founder, vs. 12% or so of public SaaS companies. But 38% of bootstrapped start-ups have a solo founder.
We could draw a lot of conclusions from this, but perhaps the biggest one is if you start something entirely on your own, with no capital at all, you may own almost all of it yourself. For better or sometimes worse. Why give up a ton of a start-up you self-funded and got off the ground by yourself?
Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom’s view here:
