SearchYC.com

I've done some research on how many founders successful technology companies have. Here are the numbers for 100 publicly traded companies

 +--------------------+-----------+
 | number of founders | frequency |
 +--------------------+-----------+
 |                  1 |        40 | 
 |                  2 |        31 | 
 |                  3 |        17 | 
 |                  4 |         6 | 
 |                  5 |         2 | 
 |                  6 |         1 | 
 |                  7 |         1 | 
 |                  8 |         1 | 
 |                 13 |         1 | 
 +--------------------+-----------+

Some caveats

The number of sole founder companies is probably slightly exaggerated because sometimes one person is so much more prominent that the others are never mentioned. I did a little double checking though. Another important thing is that some companies were omitted because I knew only that they had several founders but I wasn't able to find out exactly how many. I suspect there are more companies with 4, 5, 6 or more founders.

Unfortunately without numbers about failed companies we still don't know the success ratio of each frequency group, which is what's most interesting for startup founders here. It is well possible that sole founders fail 10 times as often as 2 founder companies, or vice versa. For anyone interested in double checking (yes I'm sure there are errors ;-) here's the full list:

 +-----------------------------+--------------------+
 | company                     | number of founders |
 +-----------------------------+--------------------+
 | ACS                         |                  1 | 
 | Activision                  |                  5 | 
 | Adobe                       |                  2 | 
 | Akamai                      |                  4 | 
 | Altera                      |                  3 | 
 | Amazon                      |                  1 | 
 | AMD                         |                  8 | 
 | Amphenol                    |                  1 | 
 | Analog Devices              |                  2 | 
 | Ansys                       |                  1 | 
 | Apple                       |                  3 | 
 | Applied Biosystems          |                  2 | 
 | Aspen Technology            |                  1 | 
 | Autodesk                    |                 13 | 
 | Avnet                       |                  1 | 
 | Baidu                       |                  2 | 
 | BEA                         |                  3 | 
 | Beckman Coulter             |                  1 | 
 | BMC                         |                  3 | 
 | Broadcom                    |                  2 | 
 | Brocade                     |                  4 | 
 | CA                          |                  1 | 
 | Canon                       |                  2 | 
 | Cerner                      |                  3 | 
 | Check Point Software        |                  3 | 
 | CheckFree                   |                  1 | 
 | Cisco                       |                  2 | 
 | Citrix                      |                  1 | 
 | Cognos                      |                  2 | 
 | Compuware                   |                  3 | 
 | CSC                         |                  3 | 
 | Cypress Semiconductor       |                  1 | 
 | Cytyc                       |                  1 | 
 | Dell                        |                  1 | 
 | Dolby Laboratories          |                  1 | 
 | Eaton Corp.                 |                  3 | 
 | Ebay                        |                  1 | 
 | Electronic Arts             |                  1 | 
 | EMC                         |                  2 | 
 | Fiserv                      |                  2 | 
 | Flextronics                 |                  1 | 
 | Garmin                      |                  4 | 
 | Google                      |                  2 | 
 | Harris Corp.                |                  2 | 
 | HP                          |                  2 | 
 | IBM                         |                  1 | 
 | IMS Health                  |                  2 | 
 | Informatica                 |                  2 | 
 | Infosys                     |                  7 | 
 | Intel                       |                  2 | 
 | Intuit                      |                  2 | 
 | Jabil Circuit               |                  2 | 
 | Juniper Networks            |                  3 | 
 | Konami                      |                  1 | 
 | Kyocera                     |                  1 | 
 | Lam Research                |                  1 | 
 | Logitech                    |                  3 | 
 | LSI Corporation             |                  3 | 
 | Man Tech                    |                  1 | 
 | McAfee                      |                  1 | 
 | Micron Technology           |                  2 | 
 | Microsoft                   |                  2 | 
 | Mindray                     |                  1 | 
 | Motorola                    |                  2 | 
 | NetApp                      |                  3 | 
 | Nokia                       |                  1 | 
 | Novell                      |                  4 | 
 | Nvidia                      |                  3 | 
 | Open Text                   |                  1 | 
 | Oracle                      |                  3 | 
 | Parametric Technology Corp. |                  1 | 
 | Philips                     |                  1 | 
 | Qualcomm                    |                  2 | 
 | Quest Software              |                  2 | 
 | RIM                         |                  2 | 
 | Roper Industries            |                  1 | 
 | SAIC                        |                  1 | 
 | Salesforce                  |                  1 | 
 | SanDisk                     |                  2 | 
 | SAP                         |                  5 | 
 | Satyam                      |                  1 | 
 | Seagate                     |                  2 | 
 | Siemens                     |                  1 | 
 | SRA International           |                  1 | 
 | Sun Microsystems            |                  4 | 
 | SunPower                    |                  1 | 
 | Sybase                      |                  2 | 
 | Symantec                    |                  1 | 
 | Synaptics                   |                  2 | 
 | Tellabs                     |                  6 | 
 | Thomson                     |                  1 | 
 | TI                          |                  4 | 
 | Tibco                       |                  1 | 
 | Trimble Navigation          |                  3 | 
 | VMware                      |                  2 | 
 | Waters Corp.                |                  1 | 
 | Wipro                       |                  1 | 
 | Xerox                       |                  2 | 
 | Xilinx                      |                  3 | 
 | Yahoo                       |                  2 | 
 +-----------------------------+--------------------+

No no, Microsoft + Yahoo! = Microwho? ;-)

One thing that's missing from the article is that there isn't just one kind of hard work. Some people work very hard and very inefficiently. They never analyse how they do things and how they could do them better.

A company that's been declining for 8 quarters in a row and trades at 40 times earnings (before the Microsoft offer) is not undervalued.

To be honest I can't take it seriously when a company that makes billions from crawling other people's sites makes a rule that you're not allowed to crawl theirs.

Google has a lot of conflicts with media companies and it always starts out with google ignoring some "rules" expecting to either win in court or settle at some point.

So I think breaking these rules is part of the process of how sensible rules are established in the first place. Yes it's recursive, but HN readers should be smart enough to understand that ;-)

The article sounds so beautiful, so beautiful, all the joy and the flowers and the harmony and the japanese and the danish and the total lack of language wars and crusades ... sorry, seems I've fallen asleep at the keyboard.

Anyone remember how you felt when you moved from C++ to Java? Wasn't it a joy? As if somebody had thought, hey I'll make a language for people to enjoy. No memory management! Yeah! No obscure macros! Just clean, beautiful code that everybody could immediately understand and nobody would shoot themselves in the foot.

We didn't think about how many times we would have to type getSomeField() { ... } and setSomeField(...) {...}. We didn't think about how entire frameworks, byte code manipulation weirdness, special purpose runtime containers, poorly integrated language extensions, etc would have to be written and deployed to overcome the metaprogramming deficiencies of Java. We were so glad to get rid of those breathtaking C++ compiler errors resulting from template crazyness that we didn't think about how statically typed languages really need type parameters.

For short, we didn't think about anything relating to the power of the language, we just felt joy and a big relief that the C++ curse had been taken from our souls, aching for harmony.

At least for myself I can say I'm not going to make that same mistake a second time. F..k harmony and joy! Let's switch our brains on before we jump onto the next language! I'll take a language war any day if it makes me think hard about how the features of a language behave once a system grows.

You know, if yahoo is unable to find a way to make money off something like Flickr, there is no way any number of layoffs will save them.

And there's something else I don't get. Why are they not trying to outsource projects that they do not consider to be core? Why are they not asking people like George to enter into some other kind of contractual relationship with them that would allow the continuation of a good project? Someone as well connected as George might be able to find additional funding for Flickr Commons from other sources.

And our own laws?

For me it's the other way around. I like the MacBook hardware a lot but I'm not so happy with Mac OS.

Mac OS memory management is awful compared to Linux or Windows and makes the entire system feel sluggish. Safari keeps crashing. Spaces is broken. Not being able to maximise windows is annoying. Transparent menus are hard to read (what am I supposed to see behind them anyway?).

There are a lot of positives as well, but all being said, I'm not going to pay that premium next time.

I never found this objects first idea very plausible. It's just OO dogma, not cognitive science. Which of the following expressions is most "natural" in your view?

person.buy(house, agency, contract)

agency.sell(house, contract, person)

house.sale(person, agency, contract)

contract.fulfil(house, person, agency)

Of course the decision is not taken based on what's easiest to explain to non computer users but rather on which object's encapsulated data is most affected by the operation, or which inheritance hierarchy should be used to look up the operation. In most non trivial cases that's extremely subjective. Being forced to make that decision _every time_ you call or write a function is a complete waste of intellectual effort.

Since there is always one name for what should happen (the name of the function) but potentially many objects that are involved in some capacity, it seems much more consistent to give a special syntactical place to the function rather than to any of the objects:

sell(house, person, contract) or if you prefer (sell house person contract)