As a founder, you doubtless have come across frameworks such as Lean Startup that promise to help you succeed on your startup journey. Unfortunately, many innovators and entrepreneurs find that such frameworks and advice fall short of their promise. Why? It’s very simple: there is a tremendous amount of variation among innovations and the startup companies that are built around. Those simple, elegant frameworks work in many cases and flop in others because they fail to account for important differences that make each startup unique.

I’m not saying that classic books such as Lean Startup and Four Steps to the Epiphany are hogwash, but founders would be well served to consider why such generalized advice might not work for their enterprise and how to accomplish their goals given their unique challenges and constraints. Below, I will go over my classification of innovations and will touch on important qualities that drive growth and development strategies for each.

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People say that ideas are a dime a dozen, but many entrepreneurs—even experienced ones—struggle to come up with promising product ideas. The fact that you have an idea that excites you is a great milestone, and even though the startup journey is long and arduous, you at least have got a ticket to the show now. However, starting to build your product at the outset can be extremely risky (unless you are working on a breakthrough platform technology such as blockchain or quantum computing).

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Being an early founder means having to set vision, inspire, delegate, sell constantly, build trust, and play many, many, many roles in between. One role that is latent but extremely important is that of choosing partners. It is an important role that can make or break companies.

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A TechCrunch article published in 2016 argued that startups that have more than one founder aren’t necessarily more successful. The author pointed out that at the time of writing, 52.3% of startups that exited (were acquired or IPO’d) had only one founder. This analysis flew in the face of conventional wisdom: that teams needed two or three co-founders to make it. While I don’t dispute the findings, I do think that summary statistics miss a number of nuances that are critical when deciding whether or not to bring on a co-founder. In this article, we’ll dive deeper into the dynamics that are likely to drive this decision.

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