Solo Founders in 2025: Why One Third of All Startups are Flying Solo
Solo founders now start 36.3% of new companies. Explore Carta data behind the rise of solo founding — and why the co-founder default no longer holds.
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Profiles
This Solo Founder Can Predict the Future
"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
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How a solo founder turned a side project into a $2.5B workflow automation giant
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
The Case for Supermemory is The Case for Solo Founders
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%
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Your Customers Say It Better
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 -
Profiles
Building solo with Anjan Katta
“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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Reasons to Have a Co-Founder (instead of going solo)
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.
Profiles
One step closer to a lifespan‐extension drug for dogs & Enterprise Sales Reality Check
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 at ISTE & How Top VCs Evaluate Solo Founders
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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GTM lessons from Founding Sales & The 20% close-rate pricing rule
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
The $80M sale of Base44 & Early teammates as a solo founder
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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Ex-Scale AI engineer's Cursor hack & Unfiltered fundraising advice
“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.