Plug is announcing a $20M raise led by LSVP. Here’s the behind-the scenes story of a solo founder with an earned insight and incredible timing. "Co-founder conflict is one of the top killers of a startup, if not the number one killer." Jimmy Douglas spent years at
For decades, solo founders have faced a hard reality in fundraising: most investors simply wouldn't back them. As Paul Klein IV from Browserbase puts it: "In the past, a key reason not to be a solo founder was the belief that investors wouldn't back you.
Welcome to 2026. Our first piece this year is about making progress. It’s an expanded commentary on “Lesson #7” from 25 Lessons from the first year of Solo Founders. There are many creative ways to procrastinate and not get started. One of the least imaginative and industry-endorsed is burning
This year we launched the Solo Founders Program. We believed that building alone was more viable than conventional wisdom suggested. It turned out we were right but off by an order of magnitude. Here are some things we learned about solo founding in 2025: Core Solo Founding Ideas 1. You
For decades, the conventional beliefs have been clear: you need a co-founder. Y Combinator practically mandates it. VCs view solo founders with the same suspicion they reserved for some hardware startups or edtech companies. A founder flying solo is a often considered red flag, a sign of someone who couldn&
"2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. Little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world." Can you predict the future? Shayne Coplan bets that we all can. The NYSE's parent co certainly thinks so, investing $2B in
Six years ago, Jan Oberhauser was a solo founder in Berlin, frustrated by the complexity of workflow automation. He was hacking away on a side project. Today, that side project is now a European unicorn with a $180 million Series C announcement fresh off the press. n8n’s valuation jumped
Supermemory is Dhravya in company form. I jokingly suggested Dhravya write “Unforgettable” on the backside of sweatpants with the Supermemory logo and give them out as swag. He took it seriously. A few weeks later, the sweatpants arrived. When people talk about solo founding, they often incorrectly focus on “100%
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 -
“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
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.
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
Resources
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
Resources
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’
Resources
“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.
News
“Candidly speaking, Wander is my soul, but as a company” John Andrew and the Wander team just closed a $50M Series B, co-led by Fifth Wall and QED Investors. Another big win for solo founders — congrats, John Andrew and team! What’s Wander? Think Airbnb-style vacation homes with the consistent