But then again how many of these companies with cofounders, really only had cofounders-in-name-only? Where one person really drove everything but at some point thought - oh shit, if I'm going to be successful, I need a cofounder!

Given the dogmatic advice "YOU NEED A COFOUNDER", I'm sure a lot of it's title inflation - what would normally be first employees are elevated to founder status to look good for the pitch deck or just to follow the advice. That said, they're still going to be quality people - less met at a find-a-technical-cofounder event, more Biz Stone style "can my title be cofounder lol?"

That doesn't really disprove the point though.

Probably the vast majority of startups have a dominant cofounder. You might call them cofounders-in-name-only, but that still validates the notion that you're better off finding a cofounder (even if they're not as central).

Yeah it's just another perspective

I don't think it validates it - if their not as central why not make them an employee with less equity / control

Came here to say this, and in general any dataset that has a chance of having incomplete data is going to tends towards this same result.

Maybe the problem is less pronounced for "successful" companies, but given my past experience looking at the data, I wouldn't take this at face value.