"Well, duh, if you have 3 equal co-founders you personally have just diluted by 66.66% and you haven’t even raised a penny!"<p>This argument is mistaken. If the third person can do as much work as each of the first two, they will each have less of a proportionately more valuable company.<p>If the dilution argument were correct, the optimal number of founders would be 1, and that is certainly not true.<p>We find from experience that 2 or 3 founders is optimal. If famous companies more often have 2 founders than 3, it's probably mostly because people who want to start their own companies are rare; obviously clusters of 2 are going to be more common than clusters of 3.
<i>"I recommend that you start a company by yourself and own 100% of it. Once it’s set up I recommend bringing in a co-founder and giving them 10-30% of the company depending upon when you bring them in. I advocate treating them like a co-founder in every way except when they join and how much equity they get."</i><p>I'm glad he said this. This has been my plan, not so much by design but just by circumstance, but it's nice to have validation.
I think there may be a danger in labeling yourself based on your weaknesses. It could lead to subconsciously shutting down options because they involve your "weakness". Essentially, if you don't explore your weakness and try to gain strength in that area then you risk letting it atrophy.<p>For example, if you're a "technically-savvy, introverted programmer" and you hire in a "outgoing marketeer" to handle all the customer relations then you may find that you loose touch with customers and loose sight of the company as a whole.