10 ms·
Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
- ivape 1y agoI can see it happening. You have to utilize a lot of other one person startup services, so ultimately it’s a still a virtual company. But you won’t have to be beholden to anyone other than the customer.
- ghaff 1y agoYou almost certainly want to have a partner you can depend on to backfill and probably a few people who you have vetted and aren't just a relatively anonymous email. I don't really buy that it makes sense to just be a single-person company at that scale even with external services.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoIf it were really pulling in that kind of revenue, surely you would need/want in house accounting/tax.
- ghaff 1y agoI'd probably worry less about in-house accounting and legal than I would a lot of other things. Those are probably pretty hirable. Depends on the nature of the business of course. As I noted elsewhere, my more immediate concern would be someone who could handle critical matters if you, your wife, or your child is sick (or god forbid you go on vacation) and there are immediate important matters that need to be dealt with properly.
- rideontime 1y agoThe dream of AI: eliminating all human relationships not mediated by a B2B SaaS contract.
- cayleyh 1y agoI structure all my personal relationships around B2B SaaS contracts. Mom isn't happy when I make changes to the ToS but I've got pretty hard vendor lock-in and a defensible moat there, so I mostly don't worry about the reputational damage.
- jibolash 1y agoSo every individual becomes a company? The natural tendency of capitalism is to create bigger companies for "scale". Even if it was possible, what exactly would be the benefit of one person companies?
- supportengineer 1y agoEveryone can write off their very own Ford Raptor for starters
- ivape 1y agoIf you can’t imagine the benefits then don’t worry about it. The jungle ain’t for everybody.
- jibolash 1y agoOkay Tarzan
- CafeRacer 1y agoI'd predict a one person unicorn company potentionally possible, but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point. Not a company that delivers a great product and can be sustainable in the long run. 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.
- BoorishBears 1y agoI agree with the article that it won't happen because it's just natural to hire your way out of some pain. 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.
- crazygringo 1y ago> but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point. 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.
- mlhpdx 1y agoOh wow, that's simply not true. Many investors have spent more than that to prove a point. Sometimes in one place, sometimes over many places and years.
- crazygringo 1y agoOk, who? 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- resource_waste 1y agoDefine your terms. Do contractors count? Do patent lawyers count? Do outsourcing services to other companies count?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 1y agoFor consumer products you're going to have other people doing your manufacturing and marketing (as in "interface with consumer") for you even if they aren't employees -- e.g. Amazon drivers and such.
- nerevarthelame 1y ago>Heather Cox Richardson ... could easily replace her two copy editors with Claude. I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
- jcgrillo 1y agoyeah this is some insanely out of touch nonsense.. I have no idea who she is but the idea that any of the current crop of models could replace a copy editor is laughable. Just ask it how many times the letter b appears in blueberry.
- bluGill 1y agoThe models can replace humans. They can't do it well, but it might be good enough. If you are tiny and just barely making money at all in your job you should evaluate if this cost cutting is good enough or not. 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.
- verzali 1y agoShe runs one of the biggest newsletters on Substack. Probably earning a millon dollars a month from it. But that's pretty far off a billion. AI editors also aren't great - they help if you can't afford anything else, but as soon as you make enough to hire a real person you probably should do that.
- jcgrillo 1y agoI'm not much of a writer myself, but what little I do know about writing suggests that a "not very good" editor is actually much worse than none at all. That is, arguing with an LLM about my writing is probably going to make my writing worse, not better.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
- choilive 1y agoDo athletes count?
- jader201 1y agoWhat you're talking about is entertainers. 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.
- xeromal 1y agoI'd posit Messi isn't an entertainer unless you consider him playing soccer entertaining by using his athleticism as an athelete.
- jader201 1y agoIf an athlete’s money comes primarily from their fame and/or ticket sales from spectators, to me that’s the definition of an entertainer.
- queenkjuul 1y agoSo, all professional athletes? They're still athletes, regardless.
- ncruces 1y agoNo, because they hire someone to massage their feet and do the books. /s 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.
- murdockq 1y agoI would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.
- ge96 1y agoOculus
- bdcravens 1y agoA single founder and a one-person company aren't the same thing. Oculus had about 100 employees when they were acquired; they had about 10 at the time of their Kickstarter campaign.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoThis seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there. https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_anybody_know_how_many_people_worked_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_any...
- MattRix 1y agoYes, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that the value was created by one person. He didn’t HAVE to hire those people and it still would have eventually made a billion dollars. This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI do not think you can assume the guaranteed success of Minecraft. Sure, it bottled lightning, but to go from an indie hit to a Microsoft buyout has a lot of work in between. 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.
- carnevalem 1y agoI wrote a blog post about this topic recently. My argument is that it has already happened. https://www.andycarnevale.com/blog/one-person-billion-dollar-company/ https://www.andycarnevale.com/blog/one-person-billion-dollar...
- jldugger 1y ago> a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million. 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!
- bluGill 1y agoMost likely the person and the business are the same. It is possible (unlikely but work with me...) people might buy subscriptions to 'blugill's insights' but I am the brand you can buy the business from me but if I don't continue to write the content everyone will go elsewhere. As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it. similear for my novel, you would probably worry if I let someone else finish it. (Though wheel of time proves it can work) Now there are plenty of newsletters that are not about the auther and many of them do well-
- jldugger 1y ago> As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it 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.
- LarsDu88 1y agoOne thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time. 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!
- wslh 1y agoThis, and I'd add that if you're fortunate enough to have the resources to pursue an idea, use that time to your advantage. Don't rush: build it at your own pace. Time can be a real competitive edge compared to startups that are under pressure to sprint toward unicorn status. Network and build.
- pryelluw 1y agoMinecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.
- xnx 1y agoJ. K. Rowling?
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoAnd Satoshi.
- hardtke 1y agoIt's already almost happened with Plenty of Fish. Mostly a one person company, acquired for over $500M.
- burkaman 1y agoThis seems like an exaggeration. It was a one person company for five years, then started expanding and sold for $575M seven years later. By that time it had ~75 employees.
- jacobr1 1y agoThat provides a good case study. A single person can bootstrap a company, along with outsourcing and a ton of grit. Moving the boundaries on what tasks are automatable, at difference cost points, and different levels of experience required to figure it out probably have all shifted in favor of individuals or small founder groups in recent years. Maybe you can stay bootstrapped longer with less capital. That seems true.
- lubujackson 1y agoLet's recognize the REAL way this is achieved is by devaluing the dollar into the dirt. Well on our way!
- godelski 1y agoThe author is forgetting another scenario: a multibillionaire creates a company and values the business at $1bn. Though of course Max Fosh already did something like this[0] 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. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w
- pryelluw 1y agoSo, why not then use AI to create all these billion dollar companies for themselves? Why sell access to the model? Will there be a shovel that uncovers a billion dollar gold nugget? Why sell the shovel then?
- MattRix 1y agoyou still have to find the nugget in the first place
- TrackerFF 1y agoIt never made much sense to me. 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.
- vemv 1y agoI came here to say this! > 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.
- mlhpdx 1y agoTo put it in perspective based on recent Meta hiring, we're 1/4 of the way to an individual having a $1B valuation let alone a company.
- trhway 1y agoyep, one-person billion dollar company is less than 10x of per-employee valuation of NVDA, OpenAI, PLTR, etc. - a bunch of companies where per-employee valuation has crossed $100M. That is tens of thousands of people, not just one individual.
- notahacker 1y agoThe $1b per employee large corporation is much easier to imagine though, per the point of the OP - it's hard to imagine someone generating so much revenue that their company is valued at $1b not choosing to hire at least one person to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- trhway 1y agoWell, I don’t see much difference between $1B and $100M, and none of these companies would hire me “to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.“
- siva7 1y agoFunny how people forget this simple fact and are still arguing here if a 1-person unicorn is even possible in their imagination. Well, step out of the trees in the forest...
- yumraj 1y agoI think the biggest risk in having an actual one-person billion dollar company is the Bus Factor [0] 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- MattRix 1y agoThat assumes that the value is provided by the person’s ongoing skills rather than their skill/luck in coming up with the initial idea/brand/product.
- nudgeOrnurture 1y ago1 billion is not that much money. 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
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thedudeabides5 1y agoWho would buy a billion dollar company with a single person if the person didn't come wiht the company? 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.
- motbus3 1y agoThis is the new version of "you are just not rich because you did not put effort enough" usually said by Bateman-like guys
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- swyx 1y agoi think "one person unicorn" is good clickbait but is too egotistical/founder centric and unrealistic. it takes a team, everyone needs help, founding engineers/designers/ops/PMs/domain experts can all contribute a ton that a founder doesnt have. my proposal for this term is "Tiny Teams": https://latent.space/p/tiny https://latent.space/p/tiny
- siva7 1y agoThat was (and still is for many) the conventional wisdom that you need a team to succeed in startup land. Now a few are betting that this rule of wisdom could be proven wrong in this ai timeline.
- garbthetill 1y agoI think its possible, but i just need some clarification, does outsourcing some of the work still count as a one person company? mobile games, High end fashion have good profit margin, so one person could generation 100s of million of revenue a year 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
- o12v 1y agoThe real bottleneck are honestly VCs themselves: on Twitter they loudly opine how AI is about to replace everyone, yet in person the first question is always "how big is your team?"
- ericmcer 1y agoLol the biggest single person "company" he can think of is a newsletter. By that rational the first one-person billion dollar company will probably be a social media influencer or something.
- shitpostbot 1y ago[dead]
- amirhirsch 1y agoIf you aren't in a private group chats with folks talking about AI tools and one-person-unicorn ideas are you even a real founder?
- julianeon 1y agoIt will probably result from a leverage buyout of a monopolistic industry: they'll keep prices so low no one else can compete, then cost-cut so much it's effectively one person making strategic decisions.
- oniony 1y agoIt'll happen through hyper-inflation.
- Kiro 1y ago> Her newsletter reportedly brings in $12 million / year and a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million. 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.
- symbolicAGI 1y agoAside from required human corporate directors and corporate officers, one can imagine a zero-person billion dollar company whose roles are entirely filled by AI agents. 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-0ad082a52a70 https://chatgpt.com/share/689b9c31-bb20-8006-89fb-0ad082a52a...
- nvch 1y agoThere are always too many painful and different things to do in any business, so a single person will certainly start aggressively delegating and outsourcing after a few millions of income. 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?
- datadrivenangel 1y agoInstagram was bought for a billion dollars with a team of 13 people, so $10 billion with a team of 10 sounds possible.
- siva7 1y ago> Anything outside of consumer is highly unlikely. Enterprise money comes with enterprise headaches which will absolutely destroy a solo founder. 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.
- paxys 1y agoMeta "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. 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).
- jedberg 1y ago> Joe Rogan could fire all his staff 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.
- pradn 1y agoI'm sure we're already there with musicians as well. If you take Taylor Swift's annual revenue and multiply it by 5-10, you'll easily cross a billion. But she does require tons of staff for the stadium shows that provide the bulk of the revenue, etc. Not literally one person, but it's a company with a bus factor of one.
- paxys 1y agoAnd I'm willing to bet all that staff is contracted. Her personal employees (people she pays a regular fixed salary to) is probably in the single digits, or possibly even 0.
- throw576543 1y agoLebron James reportedly signed a billion dollar lifetime deal with Nike.
- tikhonj 1y agoIf we really had AGI, the first one-person billion dollar company would be some secretive prop trading operation spun up by some experienced trader.
- sixQuarks 1y agoDidn’t the founder of Minecraft make over $1 billion and from what I remember, he was a solo developer. 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
- beklein 1y agoI guess it is not very likely but I would suggest a solo scientists/innovator as the best candidate... 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...
- mikewarot 1y agoIt could even be some rando on HN with weird ideas about computer architecture and security. 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.
- switz 1y agoMost people who desire to build a company alone are not in the pursuit of a billion dollar outcome. They’re pursuing a path of somewhat orthogonal incentives. That said, of course it’s possible - but it’s also not that interesting. 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”.
- keybored 1y agoWhy does it matter? Can’t you just make a billion dollars by exploiting your underlings like a normal capitalist? The billion dollars won’t be worth any less.
- aklemm 1y agoWhy is that even a thing people talk about?
- viktorcode 1y agoI’m sorry, but outside of venture capital world one person billion dollars company already happened. Remember Minecraft?
- throwawaylaptop 1y agoEvery company trades on the labor of someone else somewhere via expenses. It could be electricity, or cement, or LLM access, or employees. 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?
- AndreLock 1y agoUsing valuation as a measuring stick is a bit silly given how much valuations can be inflated based on a pre-revenue idea and the pedigree of the company founder(s). When Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and walked into a room of investors saying, "I'm starting my own AI company", they arguably both created one-person, billion dollar companies right then and there.
- norir 1y agoYou can argue it, but I disagree. Whatever their skills and experience, they did nothing alone.
- hoppp 1y agoIm a one person company, but I only make an average salary