Banking isn’t the only ‘single point of failure’ entrepreneurs should be rethinking

Silicon Valley Bank is a good reminder that startups, often entrenched in the world of risk and scrappiness, sometimes forget to think about the obvious: single points of failure. But just like it makes sense to rely on a community-friendly bank, so does entrusting a single person to lead your business to success. Now that we’ve seen the former not really work out, perhaps it’s time to rethink the latter.

TechCrunch+ polled a number of early-stage founders who are building companies that have raised a Series A or less, to understand how they think about succession. The consensus is that it’s not top of mind, or even top of the list, in a world where founders are more focused on runway, product-market fit and growth.

Can that be changed?

Moving a company’s success beyond the individual founder or chief executive tasked with being the face of it is hard. I mean, there’s a reason that VCs love co-founders: Eighty percent of billion-dollar companies launched since 2005 have had two or more founders, one study shows. At the same time, co-founder breakups are one of the most common reasons startups fail. Contradictions! We love them.

Banking isn’t the only ‘single point of failure’ entrepreneurs should be rethinking by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch