You can, and many people do. The question is whether you should start there. Picking a single company means betting that you understand its business, its competitors, its management and its price better than the thousands of professionals who study it all day.
Even if you are right about the company, you can be wrong about the timing, the price or the sector. One stock can fall 50 percent in a year on news nobody saw coming. A fund holding sixty companies is cushioned against any single one of them.
Direct stocks make sense as a layer on top of a base, once you have one, and once you can afford to be wrong. A fund is the base. Crowwd itself has a stock side for research and discussion, and keeps it separate from the mutual fund side for exactly this reason.
Build the base before you build the tower. Funds are the base.