Paul Graham has a whole essay on how to succeed as a startup.
It's called not dying. How Not to Die.
He mentions their success rate being close to 50% which is astonishing.
His teams are unusually good at not dying. This is perhaps not so surprising since YC companies begin their lives super frugal style with founders living together and working from their apartment. This means that to continue beyond the $20k YC invests, they just need to cover living expenses a little while longer.
A supporting argument may come from 37Signals and Marc Hedlund who write that 3 is the perfect # of people to develop version 1.0.
Not only is keeping the initial team small useful for keeping costs low and not dying, it may be optimal for a variety of reasons.
If this works so well in Boston and San Francisco, how about India ? Whats price parity on the $5k +$5k*(numFounders) ? Who would come, and what level would they be ?
In his article Paul Graham talks about how the ego factor often keeps founders from quitting. Would that be more or less of a factor here ?
Where's the best place Pune . Bangalore ... ?
