Startups are hard. Building them alone is even harder.
For many years the image of the startup founder has been a solitary one: a brilliant individual with a powerful idea, building a company almost by force of will.
Reality is different.
Early-stage investing teaches a simple lesson: companies are rarely built by individuals. They are built by teams.
At Club degli Investitori we have seen hundreds of early-stage companies. Some succeed, many struggle, and a few fail quickly. When we look back at the cases that managed to grow, one pattern appears again and again: strong complementary teams.
Building a startup requires different skills at the same time.
Someone must develop the product. Someone must understand the market. Someone must sell, recruit talent, raise capital and manage growth.
Very few people can do all of this well.
A team also creates something equally important: resilience.
Startups rarely follow the original plan. Markets change, products evolve, assumptions prove wrong. When this happens, founders need people around them who can challenge ideas, divide responsibilities and keep moving forward when things become uncertain.
This does not mean that great founders cannot start alone. Many companies begin with a single person and grow into a team later.
But at the moment when investors decide to commit capital, what matters most is not only the idea — it is the capacity to build a company around it.
And building a company is almost always a collective effort.
That is why today we increasingly look for founding teams rather than solo founders.
Not because individuals lack talent.
But because great companies are rarely built alone.
