Many founders choose the factory, and they choose it for understandable reasons: safety in numbers, a clear set of instructions, the comfort of a recognizable path. But a factory has one purpose: to produce more of the same.
If you are making Fords, more of the same is good. But startups are not Fords. The best of what founders create comes from what makes them different.
The factory is a bundle of beliefs
The factory is not a specific accelerator or VC fund. It is the collection of beliefs that make up conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley.
The factory says you need a co-founder. The factory says you should raise money before you have customers, and when you raise, you should start hiring. The factory says there is a playbook, and your job is to follow it.
I'm not saying this as a spectator. I spent nearly seven years helping people find co-founders before I realized that the belief “you need a co-founder” is the most common reason high-potential people never start.
The factory reinforces itself
Factory beliefs get reinforced by the people already inside: investors who give the advice and founders who take it and build their identity around it. They all have an incentive to make the prescribed path seem right. It validates their past decisions. The more people inside the factory, the more reasonable it appears to stay.
Some of this advice is genuinely good. Talk to users. Ship fast. Solve a real problem. No one built a great company by ignoring customers or shipping nothing.
But the factory doesn't stop at common sense. It prescribes a specific team structure, a specific funding path, a specific sequence and applies it to every company regardless of context. Any one of these might be the right call for a specific founder at a specific moment, and painfully incorrect for another. The factory doesn't distinguish between what's universal and what's situational. That is what makes it dangerous.
AI has made it undeniable that the factory is always lagging behind. One person can now ship in a weekend what used to take a team months to build. The gap between individual capability and what the factory playbook assumes has never been wider. Before long, most new startups will be started by a single founder.