This first ran in the Solo Founders newsletter, covering the people, companies, and ideas shaping the rise of solo founders. “By VC standards we should either ‘conquer the world or die in a fire,’ and neither of these are spiritually compelling for me. I never wanted a company. I just
Jack Naglieri solo-founded Panther Labs in 2018 after reaching a conclusion he couldn't shake: security is a data problem. Over the next eight years, he built the company around that idea. Panther helps security teams detect and investigate threats across modern cloud environments. He won customers by earning
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
Yasser Elsaid's (solo founder of Chatbase) guide to sales, pricing, content, margin analysis, and more for startups.
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Your customers can describe your product better than you. The best founders I know relay their customers' voice instead of pitching their products. Instead of vague statements like "customers are begging us for this product" or "we haven't spent a dollar on marketing -
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“Daylight is me finding my own identity.” Solo Founder Playbook — Anjan Katta Edition Last week, Anjan Katta, Founder & CEO of Daylight, joined us for dinner at the SFP house. He spoke candidly about the brutal difficulty of building Daylight — solo founder, consumer hardware, deep tech during COVID — but also
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There’s a strong case for solo founders as the default path, but there are good reasons to have a co-founder. My goal is to articulate the less obvious ones.
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Loyal’s STAY clinical trial is now fully enrolled with 1,300+ dogs across 72 vet clinics. Solo Founder Spotlight - Celine Halioua (Loyal) This milestone is huge. STAY — a double‑blinded, placebo‑controlled study — is a pivotal step toward developing what could become the first FDA‑approved lifespan‑extension
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MagicSchool Makes Waves — 5 Million Educators and a $45M Series B We generally say that conferences are a distraction unless they’re where your customers are — then they can be goldmines. In 2023, MagicSchool debuted at the world’s biggest edtech gathering with a folding table, a few balloons, and
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Validate, Monetize, Repeat. Peter Kazanjy, author of Founding Sales, on taking your startup from first validation to repeatable revenue. Peter Kazanjy is a repeat founder who taught himself sales by doing it. He founded TalentBin, a talent search engine and recruiting CRM, and later sold the company to Monster Worldwide.
Profiles
Solo founder → 6 months → $80M sale to Wix Solo founder Maor Shlomo just sold his new company, Base44, to Wix for $80M — only six months after he wrote the first lines of code on a post–reserve–duty backpacking trip - and without a dollar of external funding. Shlomo isn’
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“Don’t let AI guess what good code looks like — show it explicitly.” Insights drawn from Namanyay’s (SFP S25) deep dive into an ex-Scale AI engineer's “gold-standard” files workflow. Namanyay’s newest Cursor teardown reveals a dead-simple way to stop wrestling with messy AI output: gold-standard files.