Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
marcrand.com
marcrand.com
It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines.
That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort of proprietary format.
Many companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Google could sustain a dramatically lower headcount if they started from scratch and never went outside the confines of their network monopoly markets.
From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
In fact a close example already exists -- Minecraft was very close to being a single person unicorn.
If we have a one person unicorn, I'd imagine it'd be something more like Minecraft than someones newsletter or Google!
No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.
I'm thinking about https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-Classic as the Ur-Minecraft.
Edit: Added the missing words
When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...
A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.
Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.
In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.
[1] Conveniently ignoring the contributions to graphics and music of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble, but still...
(There may be others credited; Temmie's the only one I can think of off the top of my head.)
It's certainly made a ton of money, and has generated multiples worth of that in fan content, but that's partly because Fox has been so liberal with policing trademarks/copyright.
>Yes this counts as "alone"
I don't even know what to say to that, I guess we're just straight up redefining words to make yourself feel good?
1) one person but they take VC funding
2) one person but they use open source solutions
3) one person but they live with their parents
4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
5) One person with a copper mine and a soldering gun.
Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from the primordial soup?
/s
Q: was only a single person instrumental to the creation of (product/service)?
A: if yes, then yes; if not, then no. "Yes, but... [help from family / existing wealth / ...]". Irrelevant to me.
> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.
If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.
Houses for sure, but cash? Not that common.
I am great at building without 6 figures, heck I build great things for free, why? Cuz its also my hobby.
Did I do it alone? You'd argue that no, I had my old bosses help or something because he gave me the funds to learn and work on it?
If he got it from parents instead would that change anything? What about getting it from his own savings?
To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.
I kind of wonder if something like this will come along for non-enshittified hardware and software.
I keep seeing most companies "getting on the bandwagon", such as printer companies locking their ink refills, hdtv companies collecting viewer and viewing data, and cellphones getting between you and the device you own in just about every way possible.
I can hope.
Technically. The reality is much closer to "Any piece of valuable software will get a crappy free version after some amount of time, and multiple paid copies"
But maybe other things matter more to you, that is possible of course.
But it doesn't matter for many areas. Sometimes the free stuff will get better than the common paid one (linux and blender come to mind). Sometimes it takes time (Blender), but if the value is there commoditization will happen
There are still plenty of areas where this isn't true. Or where the free versions are so far behind it may as well be true.
I work on CAD software that integrates with Catia, NX, and Creo, and the pro CAD software is light years ahead of the free alternatives. And even if the free stuff catches up, there's practically zero chance the biggest users will switch from what they're currently using. CAD lock-in is tricky. A lot of times the different CAD systems target different niches, so it's not just file format lock-in, but that a certain CAD system is better for making planes, or designing for CNC, or whatever. And most companies have automation that integrates with their particular CAD system. And the parts have to be read by newer software for decades and produce identical results, or they won't fit together right.
Some of the vendors release free versions, but they're not open source, and they're only there to steer people towards the paid versions later on.
Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.
Joe Rogan could fire all his staff and there would still be companies lining up around the block to buy his podcast for $1B+.
There are many such examples of a person having something or being something that is worth a lot to someone else, to the tune of billions.
So by that metric a one-person billion dollar company has already been achieved. What remains are the technicalities (does it need to be incorporated, does it need to have revenue, does it need to operate as a traditional business).
I think the premise is that it is only ever one person.
> Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B.
> Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.
And that we're not talking about a personal brand, but a real company with real ongoing revenue.
Basically it's a shortcut for the belief that all those other people that founders hire could be replaced with AI.
Purely from the operational perspective, you need to handle support, you need to handle billing, to handle lawsuits, to handle infrastructure, to handle incidents... and still have a good idea of what's going on.
So no, not sure it's happening.
You'd need someone who cares enough to make a point to a very niche community but doesn't care about the product enough to hire, and I think the two circles don't overlap.
... but if it did happen I expect it'd be a NSFW AI chatbot/companion, not VC-backable (or at least not openly)
There are some people building those that don't want or care about building the best product: they've realized if you get the cheapest most heavily quanitzed model around to produce NSFW content and tell a lonely person they're loved, they'll give you increasing amounts of money.
People don't generally spend $1B to prove a point.
They'll spend it on a network of users that is genuinely that valuable though. That's what Zuck did in dropping $1B on Insta.
And it seems entirely possible that if Insta were built today, it could be done with a single person.
Who has invested $1B+ in something they expected would lose money just to "prove a point"? And what was the point?
And Musk buying Twitter doesn't count because he was forced to buy it after it became clear he would lose money. He did everything he could to get out of it.
Software itself will not make people use it.
I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
i'm getting the idea though the whoever she is - she is making good amount of money: she should demand a higher bar that I don't think llm's can meet today just because she can afford it and the risk that it matters is too high.
For understanding the guy's point it helps if you know anything about Heather Cox Richardson. Merely saying her copyeditors could be replaced by AI is a gross minimization, probably most of her own work could be too.
HCRs newsletter is popular because she delivers much purer, harder Trump Derangement Syndrome than anyone else on the market. That's it, that's the entire secret to her success. She delivers an ordinary and easily LLMable service (summarizing news), but ramps the Trump hate up orders of magnitude. Her competitive edge is she delivers to a market of liberals who find themselves disgusted with the mainstream journalism because, as they see it, it tries much too hard to be neutral and unbiased. It's sort of like how the Guardian makes millions off of donations by being a very openly left wing paper, except 1000x more extreme.
One might think US journalism is not particularly neutral, but they claim they are, so if you reject the whole notion that journalism should be unbiased as idiotic appeasement the market doesn't have much for you. Into this gap steps Heather Cox Richardson, a humanities academic who for a low low price will send you a daily news report that, every day, tells you how evil and bad Trump is and how good a person you are for realizing that.
Go read some of her reports and then tell us an LLM couldn't write them cold, I dare you. It probably wouldn't even need to be a big LLM. Summarization and rewrites are things they're really good at. She never even cites sources and hallucinations aren't the sort of thing her customer base are going to notice.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_any...
This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.
Will there be a shovel that uncovers a billion dollar gold nugget? Why sell the shovel then?
If one person can make a billion dollar company, it likely means that the product itself isn't too complex or big - unless said person has been stealth developing a product for years. But in this case, let us assume it is something founded recently, and aided with AI because, well...AI. That's the pitch right?
So what moat could such a company have? If you can be one man building a billion dollar company in a very short time, hundreds, probably thousands of competitors will spawn in an instant. And everyone will be racing to the bottom to acquire customers.
Ok, so maybe one of those - the most popular, will receive massive VC funding, so that they can simply outspend their competitors into market dominance. But still, that doesn't change the fundamentals: That the product is likely trivial enough to be solo-coded by a bunch of devs out there.
I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
My take is that as the big AI players advance, and the models become better, we'll get some sort of platform where we can just generate whatever tools we need on the spot. That will, to some extent, kill off the LLM wrapper business. In the end, why pay $10 a month for some subscription if you can get the same product directly from the company that makes the machinery. Right now this isn't the case, as they don't have any such tools - but, I'd guess that in a couple of years that is possible.
> I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
Yep, and it gives me Ponzi vibes.
Near future AI systems, novel research methods and unique datasets (and a lot of luck) could let a single researcher make breakthrough advances. I am thinking of a room-temperature superconductor in materials science or a better transformer architecture in computer science, potentially yielding a billion-dollar patent or company, even if that’s beyond today’s AI system's capabilities.
The specific idea here is not important, the leverage of a new scientific advancement could be though.
Not every company needs to be a SaaS with focus on B2B that won't scale sufficiently for investors with one employee...
But it's far more likely to be someone who contracts out a lot of things, except for one core competency, and some really strong business networks, trade secrets or intellectual property.
To see for yourself how this might be done in principle, ask your favorite LLM to 1. Comprehensively describe the standard operating procedures for a selected corporate role, and to create a comprehensive plan for writing computer code to implement those SOPs.
Here is a link to a ChatGPT 5 query about the role of Chief Customer Success Officer: https://chatgpt.com/share/689b9c31-bb20-8006-89fb-0ad082a52a...
also whatsapp had ~50 employees b4 meta acquired them for billions, imagine what one can do now with aws, ai agents etc erlang/elixir is the only language that made me believe that I could make services that 100s of millions of people could use with no worries and with all the iaas options out there, i wouldnt have to care about managing it and just throw money in the furnace for scale
But you won’t have to be beholden to anyone other than the customer.
Billion dollar valuation depends on investors, investors will never pay that valuation due the inherent risk in a one-person company. They’ll force them to hire for redundancy.
I say this as someone who spend the last decade building a business with zero employees. I’m nowhere near a billion: by design & the patent absurdity of that “goal”.
But not willing to grow over a 10 person team may be a strong and feasible personal preference.
My bet is on $10 billion with a team of 10 people.
Does that still count?
If we broaden the scope like that, there are many one-person companies doing even more in gaming. Schedule I sold for $100 million in less than six months.
Maybe you can stay bootstrapped longer with less capital. That seems true.
https://www.andycarnevale.com/blog/one-person-billion-dollar...
Athletes that make that kind of money are entertaining crowds.
So the same could be said for famous actors, musicians, etc.
But athletes that aren't also entertainers don't make that kind of money.
I'm sorry, I just find the whole concept silly. Makes it sound a silly business decision to do some SRE inhouse instead of “cloud everything” (prob. with the “help” of “consultants”) even at the $1bn scale.
We already know there are billion dollar humans. Maybe this will be realized by one of those Meta hires, just getting their LLC acqui-hired.
Also, the founder of plenty of fish was a solo founder and I’m pretty sure that site was worth close to $1 billion at some point
my proposal for this term is "Tiny Teams": https://latent.space/p/tiny
And this is kind of the problem: how do you value a company held by a single person? There's no open market for shares in this company. And worse, I feel like there's a proof of non-existence:
Either:
1. The business is so simple any idiot with a billion dollars can buy and run it. I'm sure such businesses exist but not at the billion dollar status.
2. Only this one genius can, which means anyone the genius would sell to should use a valuation of 0x.
Seems like a huge problem for anyone needing some fraction of that billion to be liquid!
Now there are plenty of newsletters that are not about the auther and many of them do well-
Okay, but you need to apply some kind of time discounting for future earnings. And then you're still left with the thorny question of whether the company is worth anything without some kind of perpetual employment contract. Hence the very low multiplier of 2-3x for newsletters.
Which also makes me wonder, is this not a bet that can be filled simply by will? There's a lot of abstraction to money, so can't someone like Altman just find a one person startup and invest in them such that this happens? I think this makes the whole thing a lot trickier than it appears at face value. Personally, I wouldn't be all that shocked if something like this happened because it could probably end up being worth more in advertising than the the tens(?) of millions to invest in the company.
In the end every company is a one person company, because usually on person is in charge of what the company is doing.
So I guess we're asking, will there be huge companies where money is spent on everything but other humans?
Do contractors count? Do patent lawyers count?
Do outsourcing services to other companies count?
Pretty sure he is spot on. B2B is where most venture money goes right now, but this mythical 1-person unicorn certainly won't come from this space and will likely be missed by classic venture capitalists like YC.
my first question was: woe the hell is Heather Cox Richardson?
Ah, a historian. poor girl. doomed to never get the truth until ...
I had app and platform ideas in 2018 that would have brought quite a bit of a ruckus to the civil and CSR industry and a few game ideas that I still have not seen on the market but I also haven't talked about them so maybe that's the issue.
I have 2 or 3 practically finished screenplays on the level of movies that broke box office records . never talked about them either. neither was of any of it ever in any notes.
I babble a lot. just to bring the intentions of others to the surface.
I have ideas all over the place.
LIKE SO MANY OTHERS.
it's not gonna be a traditional unicorn.
there's gonna be an overarching narrative that's still missing, but that person won't focus on software. there's too many outs when people buy in, when people believe, when people just feel it, when they just know "this is what I want, this is what everyone (pop segment) wants".
if it's gonna be an established person like the one I mentioned above, it's gonna be some fake, whaled up BS. like bitcoin. like it happened so often in the past.
the wrong way to lure someone out who can actually make it. a one man one billion dollar company ...
come on, guys. that YT add was already a little .. much