One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.
It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines.
That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort of proprietary format.
Many companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Google could sustain a dramatically lower headcount if they started from scratch and never went outside the confines of their network monopoly markets.
From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
In fact a close example already exists -- Minecraft was very close to being a single person unicorn.
If we have a one person unicorn, I'd imagine it'd be something more like Minecraft than someones newsletter or Google!
> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.
There are still plenty of areas where this isn't true. Or where the free versions are so far behind it may as well be true.
I work on CAD software that integrates with Catia, NX, and Creo, and the pro CAD software is light years ahead of the free alternatives. And even if the free stuff catches up, there's practically zero chance the biggest users will switch from what they're currently using. CAD lock-in is tricky. A lot of times the different CAD systems target different niches, so it's not just file format lock-in, but that a certain CAD system is better for making planes, or designing for CNC, or whatever. And most companies have automation that integrates with their particular CAD system. And the parts have to be read by newer software for decades and produce identical results, or they won't fit together right.
Some of the vendors release free versions, but they're not open source, and they're only there to steer people towards the paid versions later on.
> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.
Is this really true, though? Having a one-person unicorn doesn't preclude having multi-person company competitors. They might have found competitive axes where having multiple actual humans is an advantage.
I kind of wonder if something like this will come along for non-enshittified hardware and software.
I keep seeing most companies "getting on the bandwagon", such as printer companies locking their ink refills, hdtv companies collecting viewer and viewing data, and cellphones getting between you and the device you own in just about every way possible.
There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever become household names because they're not driven to grow and build a monopoly at all costs, they're driven to build and sell very specific software to very specific organizations.
The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-disk columnar database. I don’t know if it counts as being commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to learn the language is still quite high.
This, and I'd add that if you're fortunate enough to have the resources to pursue an idea, use that time to your advantage. Don't rush: build it at your own pace. Time can be a real competitive edge compared to startups that are under pressure to sprint toward unicorn status. Network and build.
Building a global network requires not just building a successful product, but exporting that product to different geographic markets & cultures. Core product team might be 1 AI enabled developer, but what about all the other dimensions of a successful global enterprise?
> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time
Technically. The reality is much closer to "Any piece of valuable software will get a crappy free version after some amount of time, and multiple paid copies"
Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.
Minecraft swung past the $10 million in sales mark, and was well on it's way to the $100 million mark, when he hired his first employee. It's not impossible that it would have hit a valuation of $1 billion without hiring on additional employees.
I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.
No. Jeb was the main developer from 2011 onwards, the moment Minecraft left alpha. Unless there's a time hole I'm not aware of that swallowed 2011, 2012, 2013 and most of 2014, Notch is pretty much only responsible for the very base of the game.
In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.
If you're going to forget that his girlfriend worked two jobs for 5 years to even support him being able to do that, yeah, he was "alone". Just like trust fund startup bros make it "alone" (with the 500k their parents gave them).
Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6 figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with it.
Most as in < 50%, sure. However a lot of parents do.
> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.
If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.
I am curious which of the following (if any) you would define as alone:
1) one person but they take VC funding
2) one person but they use open source solutions
3) one person but they live with their parents
4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
None of these. Even the guy who runs the Primitive Technology youtube channel, building up technology solo from literal sticks and rocks he gathers himself, would not be alone, because he did not too personally manufacture the digital camera he uses to record himself creating these things.
Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from the primordial soup?
You're making some meta-point about "aloneness" where it's disqualified if they have some pre-existing threshold of wealth or connections. I disagree that's disqualifying, especially because you can play that game all the way to the bottom.
Q: was only a single person instrumental to the creation of (product/service)?
A: if yes, then yes; if not, then no. "Yes, but... [help from family / existing wealth / ...]". Irrelevant to me.
It's certainly made a ton of money, and has generated multiples worth of that in fan content, but that's partly because Fox has been so liberal with policing trademarks/copyright.
No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porsér and soon after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.
No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.
How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed? It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
> at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...
A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.
Minecraft was already wildly successful before a second employee was brought on board. As someone who was a teenager at the time, I can tell you that from 2009-2010 my friends and I talked about little else. None of the later updates fundamentally improved on that magic, they just added more content.
Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.
Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.
Joe Rogan could fire all his staff and there would still be companies lining up around the block to buy his podcast for $1B+.
There are many such examples of a person having something or being something that is worth a lot to someone else, to the tune of billions.
So by that metric a one-person billion dollar company has already been achieved. What remains are the technicalities (does it need to be incorporated, does it need to have revenue, does it need to operate as a traditional business).
I'm sure we're already there with musicians as well. If you take Taylor Swift's annual revenue and multiply it by 5-10, you'll easily cross a billion. But she does require tons of staff for the stadium shows that provide the bulk of the revenue, etc. Not literally one person, but it's a company with a bus factor of one.
And I'm willing to bet all that staff is contracted. Her personal employees (people she pays a regular fixed salary to) is probably in the single digits, or possibly even 0.
I'd predict a one person unicorn company potentionally possible, but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point. Not a company that delivers a great product and can be sustainable in the long run.
Purely from the operational perspective, you need to handle support, you need to handle billing, to handle lawsuits, to handle infrastructure, to handle incidents... and still have a good idea of what's going on.
Oh wow, that's simply not true. Many investors have spent more than that to prove a point. Sometimes in one place, sometimes over many places and years.
Who has invested $1B+ in something they expected would lose money just to "prove a point"? And what was the point?
And Musk buying Twitter doesn't count because he was forced to buy it after it became clear he would lose money. He did everything he could to get out of it.
I agree with the article that it won't happen because it's just natural to hire your way out of some pain.
You'd need someone who cares enough to make a point to a very niche community but doesn't care about the product enough to hire, and I think the two circles don't overlap.
... but if it did happen I expect it'd be a NSFW AI chatbot/companion, not VC-backable (or at least not openly)
There are some people building those that don't want or care about building the best product: they've realized if you get the cheapest most heavily quanitzed model around to produce NSFW content and tell a lonely person they're loved, they'll give you increasing amounts of money.
Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can probably be made by LLM so if you have a good idea for cryptocurrency or some crypto token and you can vibe code it with LLM, perhaps it can reach a $1bn market cap.
The only purpose of this piece is the gratuitous sideslap at Richardson and her individual political stance. First Law of Modern Politics: nothing is about what it says it is about.
yeah this is some insanely out of touch nonsense.. I have no idea who she is but the idea that any of the current crop of models could replace a copy editor is laughable. Just ask it how many times the letter b appears in blueberry.
The models can replace humans. They can't do it well, but it might be good enough. If you are tiny and just barely making money at all in your job you should evaluate if this cost cutting is good enough or not.
i'm getting the idea though the whoever she is - she is making good amount of money: she should demand a higher bar that I don't think llm's can meet today just because she can afford it and the risk that it matters is too high.
She runs one of the biggest newsletters on Substack. Probably earning a millon dollars a month from it. But that's pretty far off a billion. AI editors also aren't great - they help if you can't afford anything else, but as soon as you make enough to hire a real person you probably should do that.
I'm not much of a writer myself, but what little I do know about writing suggests that a "not very good" editor is actually much worse than none at all. That is, arguing with an LLM about my writing is probably going to make my writing worse, not better.
LLMs are good at copy editing. They recognize when words are misspelled or grammar is poor very easily, despite not being able to see individual letters.
For understanding the guy's point it helps if you know anything about Heather Cox Richardson. Merely saying her copyeditors could be replaced by AI is a gross minimization, probably most of her own work could be too.
HCRs newsletter is popular because she delivers much purer, harder Trump Derangement Syndrome than anyone else on the market. That's it, that's the entire secret to her success. She delivers an ordinary and easily LLMable service (summarizing news), but ramps the Trump hate up orders of magnitude. Her competitive edge is she delivers to a market of liberals who find themselves disgusted with the mainstream journalism because, as they see it, it tries much too hard to be neutral and unbiased. It's sort of like how the Guardian makes millions off of donations by being a very openly left wing paper, except 1000x more extreme.
One might think US journalism is not particularly neutral, but they claim they are, so if you reject the whole notion that journalism should be unbiased as idiotic appeasement the market doesn't have much for you. Into this gap steps Heather Cox Richardson, a humanities academic who for a low low price will send you a daily news report that, every day, tells you how evil and bad Trump is and how good a person you are for realizing that.
Go read some of her reports and then tell us an LLM couldn't write them cold, I dare you. It probably wouldn't even need to be a big LLM. Summarization and rewrites are things they're really good at. She never even cites sources and hallucinations aren't the sort of thing her customer base are going to notice.
I would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.
Has ConcernedApe ever talked about how much he's made from Stardew Valley before? I've seen estimates from $50M to $300M. Certainly shy of the $1B mark, but, especially if his next project is another solo coded one and does well, he's well on his way.
This seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there.
Yes, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that the value was created by one person. He didn’t HAVE to hire those people and it still would have eventually made a billion dollars.
This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
I do not think you can assume the guaranteed success of Minecraft. Sure, it bottled lightning, but to go from an indie hit to a Microsoft buyout has a lot of work in between.
Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.
A single founder and a one-person company aren't the same thing. Oculus had about 100 employees when they were acquired; they had about 10 at the time of their Kickstarter campaign.
If one person can make a billion dollar company, it likely means that the product itself isn't too complex or big - unless said person has been stealth developing a product for years. But in this case, let us assume it is something founded recently, and aided with AI because, well...AI. That's the pitch right?
So what moat could such a company have? If you can be one man building a billion dollar company in a very short time, hundreds, probably thousands of competitors will spawn in an instant. And everyone will be racing to the bottom to acquire customers.
Ok, so maybe one of those - the most popular, will receive massive VC funding, so that they can simply outspend their competitors into market dominance. But still, that doesn't change the fundamentals: That the product is likely trivial enough to be solo-coded by a bunch of devs out there.
I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
My take is that as the big AI players advance, and the models become better, we'll get some sort of platform where we can just generate whatever tools we need on the spot. That will, to some extent, kill off the LLM wrapper business. In the end, why pay $10 a month for some subscription if you can get the same product directly from the company that makes the machinery. Right now this isn't the case, as they don't have any such tools - but, I'd guess that in a couple of years that is possible.
> I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
Funny how people forget this simple fact and are still arguing here if a 1-person unicorn is even possible in their imagination. Well, step out of the trees in the forest...
yep, one-person billion dollar company is less than 10x of per-employee valuation of NVDA, OpenAI, PLTR, etc. - a bunch of companies where per-employee valuation has crossed $100M. That is tens of thousands of people, not just one individual.
The $1b per employee large corporation is much easier to imagine though, per the point of the OP - it's hard to imagine someone generating so much revenue that their company is valued at $1b not choosing to hire at least one person to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.
Well, I don’t see much difference between $1B and $100M, and none of these companies would hire me “to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.“
I guess it is not very likely but I would suggest a solo scientists/innovator as the best candidate...
Near future AI systems, novel research methods and unique datasets (and a lot of luck) could let a single researcher make breakthrough advances. I am thinking of a room-temperature superconductor in materials science or a better transformer architecture in computer science, potentially yielding a billion-dollar patent or company, even if that’s beyond today’s AI system's capabilities.
The specific idea here is not important, the leverage of a new scientific advancement could be though.
Not every company needs to be a SaaS with focus on B2B that won't scale sufficiently for investors with one employee...
It could even be some rando on HN with weird ideas about computer architecture and security.
But it's far more likely to be someone who contracts out a lot of things, except for one core competency, and some really strong business networks, trade secrets or intellectual property.
Aside from required human corporate directors and corporate officers, one can imagine a zero-person billion dollar company whose roles are entirely filled by AI agents.
To see for yourself how this might be done in principle, ask your favorite LLM to 1. Comprehensively describe the standard operating procedures for a selected corporate role, and to create a comprehensive plan for writing computer code to implement those SOPs.
I think its possible, but i just need some clarification, does outsourcing some of the work still count as a one person company? mobile games, High end fashion have good profit margin, so one person could generation 100s of million of revenue a year
also whatsapp had ~50 employees b4 meta acquired them for billions, imagine what one can do now with aws, ai agents etc erlang/elixir is the only language that made me believe that I could make services that 100s of millions of people could use with no worries and with all the iaas options out there, i wouldnt have to care about managing it and just throw money in the furnace for scale
Lol the biggest single person "company" he can think of is a newsletter. By that rational the first one-person billion dollar company will probably be a social media influencer or something.
Using valuation as a measuring stick is a bit silly given how much valuations can be inflated based on a pre-revenue idea and the pedigree of the company founder(s). When Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and walked into a room of investors saying, "I'm starting my own AI company", they arguably both created one-person, billion dollar companies right then and there.
Most people who desire to build a company alone are not in the pursuit of a billion dollar outcome. They’re pursuing a path of somewhat orthogonal incentives. That said, of course it’s possible - but it’s also not that interesting.
I say this as someone who spend the last decade building a business with zero employees. I’m nowhere near a billion: by design & the patent absurdity of that “goal”.
I think the biggest risk in having an actual one-person billion dollar company is the Bus Factor [0]
Billion dollar valuation depends on investors, investors will never pay that valuation due the inherent risk in a one-person company. They’ll force them to hire for redundancy.
There are always too many painful and different things to do in any business, so a single person will certainly start aggressively delegating and outsourcing after a few millions of income.
But not willing to grow over a 10 person team may be a strong and feasible personal preference.
My bet is on $10 billion with a team of 10 people.
> Her newsletter reportedly brings in $12 million / year and a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million.
If we broaden the scope like that, there are many one-person companies doing even more in gaming. Schedule I sold for $100 million in less than six months.
This seems like an exaggeration. It was a one person company for five years, then started expanding and sold for $575M seven years later. By that time it had ~75 employees.
That provides a good case study. A single person can bootstrap a company, along with outsourcing and a ton of grit. Moving the boundaries on what tasks are automatable, at difference cost points, and different levels of experience required to figure it out probably have all shifted in favor of individuals or small founder groups in recent years.
Maybe you can stay bootstrapped longer with less capital. That seems true.
No, because they hire someone to massage their feet and do the books. /s
I'm sorry, I just find the whole concept silly. Makes it sound a silly business decision to do some SRE inhouse instead of “cloud everything” (prob. with the “help” of “consultants”) even at the $1bn scale.
It will probably result from a leverage buyout of a monopolistic industry: they'll keep prices so low no one else can compete, then cost-cut so much it's effectively one person making strategic decisions.
For consumer products you're going to have other people doing your manufacturing and marketing (as in "interface with consumer") for you even if they aren't employees -- e.g. Amazon drivers and such.
i think "one person unicorn" is good clickbait but is too egotistical/founder centric and unrealistic. it takes a team, everyone needs help, founding engineers/designers/ops/PMs/domain experts can all contribute a ton that a founder doesnt have.
That was (and still is for many) the conventional wisdom that you need a team to succeed in startup land. Now a few are betting that this rule of wisdom could be proven wrong in this ai timeline.
> a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million.
And this is kind of the problem: how do you value a company held by a single person? There's no open market for shares in this company. And worse, I feel like there's a proof of non-existence:
Either:
1. The business is so simple any idiot with a billion dollars can buy and run it. I'm sure such businesses exist but not at the billion dollar status.
2. Only this one genius can, which means anyone the genius would sell to should use a valuation of 0x.
Seems like a huge problem for anyone needing some fraction of that billion to be liquid!
Most likely the person and the business are the same. It is possible (unlikely but work with me...) people might buy subscriptions to 'blugill's insights' but I am the brand you can buy the business from me but if I don't continue to write the content everyone will go elsewhere. As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it. similear for my novel, you would probably worry if I let someone else finish it. (Though wheel of time proves it can work)
Now there are plenty of newsletters that are not about the auther and many of them do well-
> As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it
Okay, but you need to apply some kind of time discounting for future earnings. And then you're still left with the thorny question of whether the company is worth anything without some kind of perpetual employment contract. Hence the very low multiplier of 2-3x for newsletters.
The author is forgetting another scenario: a multibillionaire creates a company and values the business at $1bn. Though of course Max Fosh already did something like this[0]
Which also makes me wonder, is this not a bet that can be filled simply by will? There's a lot of abstraction to money, so can't someone like Altman just find a one person startup and invest in them such that this happens? I think this makes the whole thing a lot trickier than it appears at face value. Personally, I wouldn't be all that shocked if something like this happened because it could probably end up being worth more in advertising than the the tens(?) of millions to invest in the company.
I structure all my personal relationships around B2B SaaS contracts. Mom isn't happy when I make changes to the ToS but I've got pretty hard vendor lock-in and a defensible moat there, so I mostly don't worry about the reputational damage.
You almost certainly want to have a partner you can depend on to backfill and probably a few people who you have vetted and aren't just a relatively anonymous email. I don't really buy that it makes sense to just be a single-person company at that scale even with external services.
I'd probably worry less about in-house accounting and legal than I would a lot of other things. Those are probably pretty hirable. Depends on the nature of the business of course. As I noted elsewhere, my more immediate concern would be someone who could handle critical matters if you, your wife, or your child is sick (or god forbid you go on vacation) and there are immediate important matters that need to be dealt with properly.
So every individual becomes a company? The natural tendency of capitalism is to create bigger companies for "scale". Even if it was possible, what exactly would be the benefit of one person companies?
> Anything outside of consumer is highly unlikely. Enterprise money comes with enterprise headaches which will absolutely destroy a solo founder.
Pretty sure he is spot on. B2B is where most venture money goes right now, but this mythical 1-person unicorn certainly won't come from this space and will likely be missed by classic venture capitalists like YC.
The real bottleneck are honestly VCs themselves: on Twitter they loudly opine how AI is about to replace everyone, yet in person the first question is always "how big is your team?"
Why does it matter? Can’t you just make a billion dollars by exploiting your underlings like a normal capitalist? The billion dollars won’t be worth any less.
my first question was: woe the hell is Heather Cox Richardson?
Ah, a historian. poor girl. doomed to never get the truth until ...
I had app and platform ideas in 2018 that would have brought quite a bit of a ruckus to the civil and CSR industry and a few game ideas that I still have not seen on the market but I also haven't talked about them so maybe that's the issue.
I have 2 or 3 practically finished screenplays on the level of movies that broke box office records . never talked about them either. neither was of any of it ever in any notes.
I babble a lot. just to bring the intentions of others to the surface.
I have ideas all over the place.
LIKE SO MANY OTHERS.
it's not gonna be a traditional unicorn.
there's gonna be an overarching narrative that's still missing, but that person won't focus on software. there's too many outs when people buy in, when people believe, when people just feel it, when they just know "this is what I want, this is what everyone (pop segment) wants".
if it's gonna be an established person like the one I mentioned above, it's gonna be some fake, whaled up BS. like bitcoin. like it happened so often in the past.
the wrong way to lure someone out who can actually make it. a one man one billion dollar company ...
come on, guys. that YT add was already a little .. much
One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.
It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines.
That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort of proprietary format.
Many companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Google could sustain a dramatically lower headcount if they started from scratch and never went outside the confines of their network monopoly markets.
From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
In fact a close example already exists -- Minecraft was very close to being a single person unicorn.
If we have a one person unicorn, I'd imagine it'd be something more like Minecraft than someones newsletter or Google!
> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.
There are still plenty of areas where this isn't true. Or where the free versions are so far behind it may as well be true.
I work on CAD software that integrates with Catia, NX, and Creo, and the pro CAD software is light years ahead of the free alternatives. And even if the free stuff catches up, there's practically zero chance the biggest users will switch from what they're currently using. CAD lock-in is tricky. A lot of times the different CAD systems target different niches, so it's not just file format lock-in, but that a certain CAD system is better for making planes, or designing for CNC, or whatever. And most companies have automation that integrates with their particular CAD system. And the parts have to be read by newer software for decades and produce identical results, or they won't fit together right.
Some of the vendors release free versions, but they're not open source, and they're only there to steer people towards the paid versions later on.
> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.
Is this really true, though? Having a one-person unicorn doesn't preclude having multi-person company competitors. They might have found competitive axes where having multiple actual humans is an advantage.
> arbitrage opportunity
I kind of wonder if something like this will come along for non-enshittified hardware and software.
I keep seeing most companies "getting on the bandwagon", such as printer companies locking their ink refills, hdtv companies collecting viewer and viewing data, and cellphones getting between you and the device you own in just about every way possible.
I can hope.
There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever become household names because they're not driven to grow and build a monopoly at all costs, they're driven to build and sell very specific software to very specific organizations.
The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-disk columnar database. I don’t know if it counts as being commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to learn the language is still quite high.
This, and I'd add that if you're fortunate enough to have the resources to pursue an idea, use that time to your advantage. Don't rush: build it at your own pace. Time can be a real competitive edge compared to startups that are under pressure to sprint toward unicorn status. Network and build.
Building a global network requires not just building a successful product, but exporting that product to different geographic markets & cultures. Core product team might be 1 AI enabled developer, but what about all the other dimensions of a successful global enterprise?
> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time
Technically. The reality is much closer to "Any piece of valuable software will get a crappy free version after some amount of time, and multiple paid copies"
Missing the feature of being free (as in libre) makes most paid-for software actually crappy in comparison.
But maybe other things matter more to you, that is possible of course.
Which of course begs the question: which definition of free was being used in the comment I responded to?
Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.
Minecraft swung past the $10 million in sales mark, and was well on it's way to the $100 million mark, when he hired his first employee. It's not impossible that it would have hit a valuation of $1 billion without hiring on additional employees.
I bought the alpha for 10 euro when it was just one dude posting on a forum and I can tell you it was very much already Minecraft and going viral.
I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.
Found this thread from around that time, it's fun to read now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289
Wasn’t 100% of the code directly written by Notch until 1-year before acquisition?
Mojang had 20+ employees way back in 2012, and they were outsourcing platform ports to other dev companies.
No. Jeb was the main developer from 2011 onwards, the moment Minecraft left alpha. Unless there's a time hole I'm not aware of that swallowed 2011, 2012, 2013 and most of 2014, Notch is pretty much only responsible for the very base of the game.
In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.
Stardew Valley?
If you're going to forget that his girlfriend worked two jobs for 5 years to even support him being able to do that, yeah, he was "alone". Just like trust fund startup bros make it "alone" (with the 500k their parents gave them).
Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6 figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with it.
And some go broke 4 times even with a billion from their parents. And still claims a win!
Lucky people. Most parents dont have 6 figures to give tho
Most as in < 50%, sure. However a lot of parents do.
> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.
If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/net-worth-states-2025
>Couldn't ever do it alone without having someone (that loves him) sacrificing so much for him.
>Yes this counts as "alone"
I don't even know what to say to that, I guess we're just straight up redefining words to make yourself feel good?
I am curious which of the following (if any) you would define as alone:
1) one person but they take VC funding
2) one person but they use open source solutions
3) one person but they live with their parents
4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
Don't forget:
5) One person with a copper mine and a soldering gun.
None of these. Even the guy who runs the Primitive Technology youtube channel, building up technology solo from literal sticks and rocks he gathers himself, would not be alone, because he did not too personally manufacture the digital camera he uses to record himself creating these things.
Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from the primordial soup?
/s
You're making some meta-point about "aloneness" where it's disqualified if they have some pre-existing threshold of wealth or connections. I disagree that's disqualifying, especially because you can play that game all the way to the bottom.
Q: was only a single person instrumental to the creation of (product/service)?
A: if yes, then yes; if not, then no. "Yes, but... [help from family / existing wealth / ...]". Irrelevant to me.
That's just semantics. I worked as a car salesman, saved over $250k, and quit to become a self taught saas guy and my php jquery mess now supports me.
Did I do it alone? You'd argue that no, I had my old bosses help or something because he gave me the funds to learn and work on it?
If he got it from parents instead would that change anything? What about getting it from his own savings?
And to keep the thread going, Undertale (Toby Fox)?
Undertale not only credits Temmie Chang, it has characters based on her in the game.
(There may be others credited; Temmie's the only one I can think of off the top of my head.)
Also not so sure that it's a billion-dollar game.
It's certainly made a ton of money, and has generated multiples worth of that in fan content, but that's partly because Fox has been so liberal with policing trademarks/copyright.
Well actually....
No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porsér and soon after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.
No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.
How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed? It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
I'm thinking about https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-Classic as the Ur-Minecraft.
Edit: Added the missing words
> at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...
A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.
Minecraft was already wildly successful before a second employee was brought on board. As someone who was a teenager at the time, I can tell you that from 2009-2010 my friends and I talked about little else. None of the later updates fundamentally improved on that magic, they just added more content.
Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742163
Chris Sawyer has entered the chat[1]
[1] Conveniently ignoring the contributions to graphics and music of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble, but still...
Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B.
Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.
Joe Rogan could fire all his staff and there would still be companies lining up around the block to buy his podcast for $1B+.
There are many such examples of a person having something or being something that is worth a lot to someone else, to the tune of billions.
So by that metric a one-person billion dollar company has already been achieved. What remains are the technicalities (does it need to be incorporated, does it need to have revenue, does it need to operate as a traditional business).
I'm sure we're already there with musicians as well. If you take Taylor Swift's annual revenue and multiply it by 5-10, you'll easily cross a billion. But she does require tons of staff for the stadium shows that provide the bulk of the revenue, etc. Not literally one person, but it's a company with a bus factor of one.
And I'm willing to bet all that staff is contracted. Her personal employees (people she pays a regular fixed salary to) is probably in the single digits, or possibly even 0.
Lebron James reportedly signed a billion dollar lifetime deal with Nike.
> Joe Rogan could fire all his staff
I think the premise is that it is only ever one person.
> Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B.
> Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.
And that we're not talking about a personal brand, but a real company with real ongoing revenue.
Basically it's a shortcut for the belief that all those other people that founders hire could be replaced with AI.
I'd predict a one person unicorn company potentionally possible, but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point. Not a company that delivers a great product and can be sustainable in the long run.
Purely from the operational perspective, you need to handle support, you need to handle billing, to handle lawsuits, to handle infrastructure, to handle incidents... and still have a good idea of what's going on.
So no, not sure it's happening.
> but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point.
People don't generally spend $1B to prove a point.
They'll spend it on a network of users that is genuinely that valuable though. That's what Zuck did in dropping $1B on Insta.
And it seems entirely possible that if Insta were built today, it could be done with a single person.
Oh wow, that's simply not true. Many investors have spent more than that to prove a point. Sometimes in one place, sometimes over many places and years.
Ok, who?
Who has invested $1B+ in something they expected would lose money just to "prove a point"? And what was the point?
And Musk buying Twitter doesn't count because he was forced to buy it after it became clear he would lose money. He did everything he could to get out of it.
Ok, so you're saying that there were not a single 1B+ valuation company out there that failed?
No, that has nothing to do at all with anything I said.
I agree with the article that it won't happen because it's just natural to hire your way out of some pain.
You'd need someone who cares enough to make a point to a very niche community but doesn't care about the product enough to hire, and I think the two circles don't overlap.
... but if it did happen I expect it'd be a NSFW AI chatbot/companion, not VC-backable (or at least not openly)
There are some people building those that don't want or care about building the best product: they've realized if you get the cheapest most heavily quanitzed model around to produce NSFW content and tell a lonely person they're loved, they'll give you increasing amounts of money.
Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can probably be made by LLM so if you have a good idea for cryptocurrency or some crypto token and you can vibe code it with LLM, perhaps it can reach a $1bn market cap.
One bug and the value crashes to 0 though
We're definitely closer to the one-person billion dollar company than bug free vibe coded software.
I mean... you can just copy/paste BTC or ETH software, name it differently... or get ERC721 and name it something.
Software itself will not make people use it.
>Heather Cox Richardson ... could easily replace her two copy editors with Claude.
I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
The only purpose of this piece is the gratuitous sideslap at Richardson and her individual political stance. First Law of Modern Politics: nothing is about what it says it is about.
yeah this is some insanely out of touch nonsense.. I have no idea who she is but the idea that any of the current crop of models could replace a copy editor is laughable. Just ask it how many times the letter b appears in blueberry.
The models can replace humans. They can't do it well, but it might be good enough. If you are tiny and just barely making money at all in your job you should evaluate if this cost cutting is good enough or not.
i'm getting the idea though the whoever she is - she is making good amount of money: she should demand a higher bar that I don't think llm's can meet today just because she can afford it and the risk that it matters is too high.
She runs one of the biggest newsletters on Substack. Probably earning a millon dollars a month from it. But that's pretty far off a billion. AI editors also aren't great - they help if you can't afford anything else, but as soon as you make enough to hire a real person you probably should do that.
I'm not much of a writer myself, but what little I do know about writing suggests that a "not very good" editor is actually much worse than none at all. That is, arguing with an LLM about my writing is probably going to make my writing worse, not better.
LLMs are good at copy editing. They recognize when words are misspelled or grammar is poor very easily, despite not being able to see individual letters.
For understanding the guy's point it helps if you know anything about Heather Cox Richardson. Merely saying her copyeditors could be replaced by AI is a gross minimization, probably most of her own work could be too.
HCRs newsletter is popular because she delivers much purer, harder Trump Derangement Syndrome than anyone else on the market. That's it, that's the entire secret to her success. She delivers an ordinary and easily LLMable service (summarizing news), but ramps the Trump hate up orders of magnitude. Her competitive edge is she delivers to a market of liberals who find themselves disgusted with the mainstream journalism because, as they see it, it tries much too hard to be neutral and unbiased. It's sort of like how the Guardian makes millions off of donations by being a very openly left wing paper, except 1000x more extreme.
One might think US journalism is not particularly neutral, but they claim they are, so if you reject the whole notion that journalism should be unbiased as idiotic appeasement the market doesn't have much for you. Into this gap steps Heather Cox Richardson, a humanities academic who for a low low price will send you a daily news report that, every day, tells you how evil and bad Trump is and how good a person you are for realizing that.
Go read some of her reports and then tell us an LLM couldn't write them cold, I dare you. It probably wouldn't even need to be a big LLM. Summarization and rewrites are things they're really good at. She never even cites sources and hallucinations aren't the sort of thing her customer base are going to notice.
You should do it! I bet you could pitch a seed round for that business, might be your big break
I would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.
Has ConcernedApe ever talked about how much he's made from Stardew Valley before? I've seen estimates from $50M to $300M. Certainly shy of the $1B mark, but, especially if his next project is another solo coded one and does well, he's well on his way.
This seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_any...
Yes, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that the value was created by one person. He didn’t HAVE to hire those people and it still would have eventually made a billion dollars.
This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
I do not think you can assume the guaranteed success of Minecraft. Sure, it bottled lightning, but to go from an indie hit to a Microsoft buyout has a lot of work in between.
Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.
Oculus
A single founder and a one-person company aren't the same thing. Oculus had about 100 employees when they were acquired; they had about 10 at the time of their Kickstarter campaign.
So, why not then use AI to create all these billion dollar companies for themselves? Why sell access to the model?
Will there be a shovel that uncovers a billion dollar gold nugget? Why sell the shovel then?
you still have to find the nugget in the first place
It never made much sense to me.
If one person can make a billion dollar company, it likely means that the product itself isn't too complex or big - unless said person has been stealth developing a product for years. But in this case, let us assume it is something founded recently, and aided with AI because, well...AI. That's the pitch right?
So what moat could such a company have? If you can be one man building a billion dollar company in a very short time, hundreds, probably thousands of competitors will spawn in an instant. And everyone will be racing to the bottom to acquire customers.
Ok, so maybe one of those - the most popular, will receive massive VC funding, so that they can simply outspend their competitors into market dominance. But still, that doesn't change the fundamentals: That the product is likely trivial enough to be solo-coded by a bunch of devs out there.
I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
My take is that as the big AI players advance, and the models become better, we'll get some sort of platform where we can just generate whatever tools we need on the spot. That will, to some extent, kill off the LLM wrapper business. In the end, why pay $10 a month for some subscription if you can get the same product directly from the company that makes the machinery. Right now this isn't the case, as they don't have any such tools - but, I'd guess that in a couple of years that is possible.
I came here to say this!
> I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
Yep, and it gives me Ponzi vibes.
To put it in perspective based on recent Meta hiring, we're 1/4 of the way to an individual having a $1B valuation let alone a company.
Funny how people forget this simple fact and are still arguing here if a 1-person unicorn is even possible in their imagination. Well, step out of the trees in the forest...
yep, one-person billion dollar company is less than 10x of per-employee valuation of NVDA, OpenAI, PLTR, etc. - a bunch of companies where per-employee valuation has crossed $100M. That is tens of thousands of people, not just one individual.
The $1b per employee large corporation is much easier to imagine though, per the point of the OP - it's hard to imagine someone generating so much revenue that their company is valued at $1b not choosing to hire at least one person to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.
Well, I don’t see much difference between $1B and $100M, and none of these companies would hire me “to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.“
J. K. Rowling?
And Satoshi.
I guess it is not very likely but I would suggest a solo scientists/innovator as the best candidate...
Near future AI systems, novel research methods and unique datasets (and a lot of luck) could let a single researcher make breakthrough advances. I am thinking of a room-temperature superconductor in materials science or a better transformer architecture in computer science, potentially yielding a billion-dollar patent or company, even if that’s beyond today’s AI system's capabilities.
The specific idea here is not important, the leverage of a new scientific advancement could be though.
Not every company needs to be a SaaS with focus on B2B that won't scale sufficiently for investors with one employee...
It could even be some rando on HN with weird ideas about computer architecture and security.
But it's far more likely to be someone who contracts out a lot of things, except for one core competency, and some really strong business networks, trade secrets or intellectual property.
Aside from required human corporate directors and corporate officers, one can imagine a zero-person billion dollar company whose roles are entirely filled by AI agents.
To see for yourself how this might be done in principle, ask your favorite LLM to 1. Comprehensively describe the standard operating procedures for a selected corporate role, and to create a comprehensive plan for writing computer code to implement those SOPs.
Here is a link to a ChatGPT 5 query about the role of Chief Customer Success Officer: https://chatgpt.com/share/689b9c31-bb20-8006-89fb-0ad082a52a...
I think its possible, but i just need some clarification, does outsourcing some of the work still count as a one person company? mobile games, High end fashion have good profit margin, so one person could generation 100s of million of revenue a year
also whatsapp had ~50 employees b4 meta acquired them for billions, imagine what one can do now with aws, ai agents etc erlang/elixir is the only language that made me believe that I could make services that 100s of millions of people could use with no worries and with all the iaas options out there, i wouldnt have to care about managing it and just throw money in the furnace for scale
Lol the biggest single person "company" he can think of is a newsletter. By that rational the first one-person billion dollar company will probably be a social media influencer or something.
Using valuation as a measuring stick is a bit silly given how much valuations can be inflated based on a pre-revenue idea and the pedigree of the company founder(s). When Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and walked into a room of investors saying, "I'm starting my own AI company", they arguably both created one-person, billion dollar companies right then and there.
You can argue it, but I disagree. Whatever their skills and experience, they did nothing alone.
Most people who desire to build a company alone are not in the pursuit of a billion dollar outcome. They’re pursuing a path of somewhat orthogonal incentives. That said, of course it’s possible - but it’s also not that interesting.
I say this as someone who spend the last decade building a business with zero employees. I’m nowhere near a billion: by design & the patent absurdity of that “goal”.
I think the biggest risk in having an actual one-person billion dollar company is the Bus Factor [0]
Billion dollar valuation depends on investors, investors will never pay that valuation due the inherent risk in a one-person company. They’ll force them to hire for redundancy.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
That assumes that the value is provided by the person’s ongoing skills rather than their skill/luck in coming up with the initial idea/brand/product.
There are always too many painful and different things to do in any business, so a single person will certainly start aggressively delegating and outsourcing after a few millions of income.
But not willing to grow over a 10 person team may be a strong and feasible personal preference.
My bet is on $10 billion with a team of 10 people.
Does that still count?
Instagram was bought for a billion dollars with a team of 13 people, so $10 billion with a team of 10 sounds possible.
It'll happen through hyper-inflation.
> Her newsletter reportedly brings in $12 million / year and a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million.
If we broaden the scope like that, there are many one-person companies doing even more in gaming. Schedule I sold for $100 million in less than six months.
It's already almost happened with Plenty of Fish. Mostly a one person company, acquired for over $500M.
This seems like an exaggeration. It was a one person company for five years, then started expanding and sold for $575M seven years later. By that time it had ~75 employees.
That provides a good case study. A single person can bootstrap a company, along with outsourcing and a ton of grit. Moving the boundaries on what tasks are automatable, at difference cost points, and different levels of experience required to figure it out probably have all shifted in favor of individuals or small founder groups in recent years.
Maybe you can stay bootstrapped longer with less capital. That seems true.
I wrote a blog post about this topic recently. My argument is that it has already happened.
https://www.andycarnevale.com/blog/one-person-billion-dollar...
Who would buy a billion dollar company with a single person if the person didn't come wiht the company?
We already know there are billion dollar humans. Maybe this will be realized by one of those Meta hires, just getting their LLC acqui-hired.
Do athletes count?
What you're talking about is entertainers.
Athletes that make that kind of money are entertaining crowds.
So the same could be said for famous actors, musicians, etc.
But athletes that aren't also entertainers don't make that kind of money.
I'd posit Messi isn't an entertainer unless you consider him playing soccer entertaining by using his athleticism as an athelete.
If an athlete’s money comes primarily from their fame and/or ticket sales from spectators, to me that’s the definition of an entertainer.
No, because they hire someone to massage their feet and do the books. /s
I'm sorry, I just find the whole concept silly. Makes it sound a silly business decision to do some SRE inhouse instead of “cloud everything” (prob. with the “help” of “consultants”) even at the $1bn scale.
It will probably result from a leverage buyout of a monopolistic industry: they'll keep prices so low no one else can compete, then cost-cut so much it's effectively one person making strategic decisions.
For consumer products you're going to have other people doing your manufacturing and marketing (as in "interface with consumer") for you even if they aren't employees -- e.g. Amazon drivers and such.
i think "one person unicorn" is good clickbait but is too egotistical/founder centric and unrealistic. it takes a team, everyone needs help, founding engineers/designers/ops/PMs/domain experts can all contribute a ton that a founder doesnt have.
my proposal for this term is "Tiny Teams": https://latent.space/p/tiny
That was (and still is for many) the conventional wisdom that you need a team to succeed in startup land. Now a few are betting that this rule of wisdom could be proven wrong in this ai timeline.
If we really had AGI, the first one-person billion dollar company would be some secretive prop trading operation spun up by some experienced trader.
> a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million.
And this is kind of the problem: how do you value a company held by a single person? There's no open market for shares in this company. And worse, I feel like there's a proof of non-existence:
Either:
1. The business is so simple any idiot with a billion dollars can buy and run it. I'm sure such businesses exist but not at the billion dollar status.
2. Only this one genius can, which means anyone the genius would sell to should use a valuation of 0x.
Seems like a huge problem for anyone needing some fraction of that billion to be liquid!
Most likely the person and the business are the same. It is possible (unlikely but work with me...) people might buy subscriptions to 'blugill's insights' but I am the brand you can buy the business from me but if I don't continue to write the content everyone will go elsewhere. As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it. similear for my novel, you would probably worry if I let someone else finish it. (Though wheel of time proves it can work)
Now there are plenty of newsletters that are not about the auther and many of them do well-
> As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it
Okay, but you need to apply some kind of time discounting for future earnings. And then you're still left with the thorny question of whether the company is worth anything without some kind of perpetual employment contract. Hence the very low multiplier of 2-3x for newsletters.
This is the new version of "you are just not rich because you did not put effort enough" usually said by Bateman-like guys
The author is forgetting another scenario: a multibillionaire creates a company and values the business at $1bn. Though of course Max Fosh already did something like this[0]
Which also makes me wonder, is this not a bet that can be filled simply by will? There's a lot of abstraction to money, so can't someone like Altman just find a one person startup and invest in them such that this happens? I think this makes the whole thing a lot trickier than it appears at face value. Personally, I wouldn't be all that shocked if something like this happened because it could probably end up being worth more in advertising than the the tens(?) of millions to invest in the company.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w
Every company trades on the labor of someone else somewhere via expenses. It could be electricity, or cement, or LLM access, or employees.
In the end every company is a one person company, because usually on person is in charge of what the company is doing.
So I guess we're asking, will there be huge companies where money is spent on everything but other humans?
Im a one person company, but I only make an average salary
Why is that even a thing people talk about?
Because too many people take Sam Altman's takes too seriously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5vsEUgxt3E
Thank you; that’s at least as dumb as I expected.
I can see it happening. You have to utilize a lot of other one person startup services, so ultimately it’s a still a virtual company.
But you won’t have to be beholden to anyone other than the customer.
The dream of AI: eliminating all human relationships not mediated by a B2B SaaS contract.
I structure all my personal relationships around B2B SaaS contracts. Mom isn't happy when I make changes to the ToS but I've got pretty hard vendor lock-in and a defensible moat there, so I mostly don't worry about the reputational damage.
You almost certainly want to have a partner you can depend on to backfill and probably a few people who you have vetted and aren't just a relatively anonymous email. I don't really buy that it makes sense to just be a single-person company at that scale even with external services.
If it were really pulling in that kind of revenue, surely you would need/want in house accounting/tax.
I'd probably worry less about in-house accounting and legal than I would a lot of other things. Those are probably pretty hirable. Depends on the nature of the business of course. As I noted elsewhere, my more immediate concern would be someone who could handle critical matters if you, your wife, or your child is sick (or god forbid you go on vacation) and there are immediate important matters that need to be dealt with properly.
So every individual becomes a company? The natural tendency of capitalism is to create bigger companies for "scale". Even if it was possible, what exactly would be the benefit of one person companies?
Everyone can write off their very own Ford Raptor for starters
If you can’t imagine the benefits then don’t worry about it. The jungle ain’t for everybody.
Okay Tarzan
> Anything outside of consumer is highly unlikely. Enterprise money comes with enterprise headaches which will absolutely destroy a solo founder.
Pretty sure he is spot on. B2B is where most venture money goes right now, but this mythical 1-person unicorn certainly won't come from this space and will likely be missed by classic venture capitalists like YC.
The real bottleneck are honestly VCs themselves: on Twitter they loudly opine how AI is about to replace everyone, yet in person the first question is always "how big is your team?"
Didn’t the founder of Minecraft make over $1 billion and from what I remember, he was a solo developer.
Also, the founder of plenty of fish was a solo founder and I’m pretty sure that site was worth close to $1 billion at some point
Define your terms.
Do contractors count? Do patent lawyers count?
Do outsourcing services to other companies count?
I’m sorry, but outside of venture capital world one person billion dollars company already happened. Remember Minecraft?
If you aren't in a private group chats with folks talking about AI tools and one-person-unicorn ideas are you even a real founder?
Let's recognize the REAL way this is achieved is by devaluing the dollar into the dirt. Well on our way!
Why does it matter? Can’t you just make a billion dollars by exploiting your underlings like a normal capitalist? The billion dollars won’t be worth any less.
1 billion is not that much money.
my first question was: woe the hell is Heather Cox Richardson?
Ah, a historian. poor girl. doomed to never get the truth until ...
I had app and platform ideas in 2018 that would have brought quite a bit of a ruckus to the civil and CSR industry and a few game ideas that I still have not seen on the market but I also haven't talked about them so maybe that's the issue.
I have 2 or 3 practically finished screenplays on the level of movies that broke box office records . never talked about them either. neither was of any of it ever in any notes.
I babble a lot. just to bring the intentions of others to the surface.
I have ideas all over the place.
LIKE SO MANY OTHERS.
it's not gonna be a traditional unicorn.
there's gonna be an overarching narrative that's still missing, but that person won't focus on software. there's too many outs when people buy in, when people believe, when people just feel it, when they just know "this is what I want, this is what everyone (pop segment) wants".
if it's gonna be an established person like the one I mentioned above, it's gonna be some fake, whaled up BS. like bitcoin. like it happened so often in the past.
the wrong way to lure someone out who can actually make it. a one man one billion dollar company ...
come on, guys. that YT add was already a little .. much
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