Key Takeaways * He's not anti-co-founder — his were great. Francis built Sonder into a multi-billion-dollar company with co-founders he loved. He went solo this time because the cost of a wrong co-founder is now fatal, and the opportunity won't wait a year. * Skip the MVP. Coding agents
Key Takeaways * He got the résumé backwards — on purpose. Sold his first company at 16. Raised $3M at 19 as a solo founder. His open-source engine now has 26K+ GitHub stars. The whole point: he got there by not chasing any of it — and the day this episode drops, he
The best solo founders in 2026 do not look like lone hackers compensating for the absence of a co-founder. They look like the natural owners of a new company shape: AI-native, usually B2B, global from day one, built around recurring revenue, and unusually close to the customer. Stripe's
Introduction The conversation with Michael Grinich starts without an intro. He and Julian just sit down and go — Michael only realizes at the end that they never recorded a proper open. It's a fitting accident, because Michael doesn't deal in preamble. He is the solo founder
Introduction By the time Minn Kim sat down with Julian to talk about Lighthouse, she had quietly become the person an entire generation of frontier-tech founders calls when they need to bring someone into the United States. She is solo. She is not a lawyer. The first two people she
Introduction By the time David J. Phillips refounded the company that became Fondo, he had been through four co-founder relationships across four different startups. The first one ended when he and his college co-founder moved to different cities and quietly built two separate companies doing the same thing. The second
Introduction The press was calling EVs dead. The Inflation Reduction Act incentives had just expired. Roughly $20 billion in EV investment between the OEMs and the federal government had been cancelled. Demand looked like it had been pulled forward into the prior quarter, and what remained was a vacuum. In
Introduction Two trillion dollars of economic activity flows through local government every year. City councils decide it. Planning commissions decide it. Public comment systems nobody attends decide it. And almost no founder will touch the market. This week's guest is the rare exception. Sunil is the founder and
For the first time ever, more than one in three new companies are being started solo. Five years ago, that number was under 25%. The default is quietly flipping in plain sight. This week the host becomes the guest. Julian Weisser — who spent years helping people find co-founders through On
Introduction Harvard Business School benchmarked Julius AI head-to-head against ChatGPT for its required "Data Science and AI for Leaders" MBA course. Julius won. All 935 first-year HBS students now use it to analyze data in plain English. The product has over two million users. It's backed
Yasser Elsaid's (solo founder of Chatbase) guide to sales, pricing, content, margin analysis, and more for startups.
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 6 with Yasser Elsaid