Key Takeaways * The one-person company is real now. Claire runs ChatPRD as the only full-time human — bootstrapped, zero VC — with a staff of nine AI agents she manages like employees. One of them emailed the studio before she arrived. * "Agents are just management." Her edge isn't
We believe the world's next great companies, discoveries, and projects start the same way they always have: one person, obsessed with something. And we believe what stops them is rarely the start. Starting is free. It's seeing it through — the parts, the compute, the bills — that
Key Takeaways * Taste isn't personalization — it's a measurable bar for quality. Personalization is one person's preference. Taste is the expert-validated judgment of what "great" looks like in a domain with no single right answer. * AI slop is a volume problem, not a
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
Key Takeaways * "If there's a doubt, there's no doubt." A co-founder is one of the top three most consequential decisions you'll ever make — and your most expensive "employee." The bar should be: I can't imagine doing this without
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
Podcast
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
Podcast
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.
Podcast
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 6 with Yasser Elsaid
Solo founders have a massive structural advantage that most of them are wasting: equity. When you start a company solo, you own 100% of it. No co-founder split, no 50/50, no negotiation over who gets more. According to Carta data in our State of Solo Founding report, solo founders
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
Podcast
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 5 with Daniel Francis
Elad Gil is one of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley — a solo GP with >$1B AUM and an investor in SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Anduril. In a recent fireside chat, he went after one of the most persistent myths in startups: that you always need a co-founder.
Podcast
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 4 with Eugenia Kuyda
Podcast
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 3 with Charles Hudson