This is really insightful. The psychological factor you mention bears the most weight in terms of getting started. So, people should change the way they think about starting. Building an app by yourself isn't cap intensive like building a railroad. The beauty is: you're not even going to waste time if you give up since you gain wisdom that carries over onto future projects. +1 for the knowledge worker. Open source developers work in peace and reap those rewards because they don't self-impose the same psychological barriers.

You're absolutely right about the value of a support system. But different people need it to varying degrees.

I think the bigger point is that when widely-respected entrepreneurs like PG automatically rule out those people who "successfully start a business by themselves every day," it can intensify the psychological blocks that prevent many aspiring entrepreneurs from starting in the first place. That means a net loss for everyone.

I've read a lot around this debate, especially on HN. And as someone a month in to their first solo venture, this idea of needing someone to keep you moving and cheer you up has been poisonous to me. I had my first moment the other night, laying in bed, when I realized I hadn't written a whole lot of code that day. I started feeling bad. "Maybe I'm not cut out for this," I thought. Or "this isn't for someone like me."

Luckily, I woke up in the morning and realized I know better. I love what I'm building without anyone telling me to love it. I code without someone telling me to code in the first place. This isn't everyone. But as mentioned in the article, the open source community is just one group of people that can build things without being externally "disciplined."

The thing is, a co-founder won't save you if you don't have self-discipline. It's probably one of the top sources of co-founder conflict, actually: one founder slacks off or loses focus, and the other(s) get upset, and the whole thing falls apart.

Self-discipline is a highly underrated quality. In my experience, most people can't work productively for an extended period of time on an open-ended project.

I think it's super important, but maybe should be considered a skill rather than a quality. It's definitely something that people don't get much practice on in school or most jobs. If you get some practice, you can improve self-discipline dramatically.

Agreed (I had terrible self-discipline when I was younger, but I have a fair amount now), but it's not a skill that can be dialed-up on demand. If you don't have it going into a startup, it's a serious liability. Learning self-discipline while also doing your first startup is probably impossibly hard.

Also, most people don't believe that it can be cultivated, which sort of begs the whole question: how do you cultivate self-discipline without the self-discipline to try to attain it? It seems that most people gain it by trying successively harder things over a long period of time.

Founding a startup with my spouse was very useful in a lot of ways, but unfortunately, despite enthusiasm my spouse lacked sufficient skills and experience, so unless your spouse has also been working at startups for a decade, it's not always ideal-- but you can count on loyalty there.

Truth is, give me a cofounder who has been working for startups for 10 years and what you say makes sense. But co-founding with someone whose first experience at a startup is founding one and it doesn't make sense.

And it's not like more resources are bad, it's a question of their cost.

That's true.

It's not always going to be the same from an advice standpoint but at worst you will have the accountability factor from somebody who's equally vested.