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
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
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.
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 4 with Eugenia Kuyda
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 3 with Charles Hudson
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 2 with Paul Klein IV
Podcast
Solo Founders Podcast — Episode 1 with Ben Cera
For decades, the conventional wisdom about solo founders and hiring has harped on a single note: you're at a disadvantage. They'll say that without a co-founder to share the load, you'll scramble to hire. Without a technical partner, you'll struggle to attract
What solo founders should actually consider about geography. Yesterday, 900 people RSVP'd to an event in San Francisco. The line stretched down the street. People were trying unsuccessfully to bribe Wayne Sutton (Head of Community at Convex) to get inside. When the main floor filled, they opened a
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&
Profiles
"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
Profiles
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
Profiles
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%
Resources
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 -