Poll: Does Having a Business Partner Improve Your Chances of Success?

Many people defend that if you want to build a successful business, you should have a partner (or more than one). The arguments used to back up this view are the following:

1. Two minds think better than one.
2. The partners can have complementary skills (i.e., one can be a good programmer, and the other one a good marketer)
3. The partners can cover for each other in the face of emergencies or periods where one of them will not be able to work for some reason.
4. When the company has no employees, two people will be able to do more work than one person alone.

It makes sense, and you also have plenty of empirical evidence to support this. Many web startups, in fact, were founded by two or more people: Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Skype and so on.

Creating a successful company alone is also possible, though, and it might have some advantages:

1. You are in control of everything and know all the angles of your business
2. There is no need to reach an agreement with another person for important business decisions.
3. There is no risk of disputes arising between the founders
4. The founder usually commits 110% to the venture, because he owns it (i.e. it is his baby)

Examples of companies that had a single founder? Amazon.com, Oracle, Craigslist and LinkedIn.

Notice that the question we are asking is NOT whether you can create a successful company alone. The examples above clearly answer that. The question is: Does having a business partner improve your chances of success?

Have your say in our poll. You are also welcome to leave a comment below expanding on your personal opinion. The poll closes on Friday, and I will post the results next Monday.

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