Let’s get real about the one-person billion dollar company

The biggest hurdle to the one-person billion dollar company is not AI capability, but founder pain tolerance.

Sam Altman is betting on it in his private group chats.

Dario Amodei predicted it’ll happen in 2026.

These geniuses think the one-person billion dollar company is inevitable, and unicorn teams are getting smaller, but a one person?

That’s not going to just happen.

One person is an intentional choice by an individual with a particular set of skills.

It’s Alex Honnold free-soloing El Capitan.

It’s David Goggins running an ultramarathon on broken feet.

The unicorn founders I know can’t even manage their email on their own, so who are we talking about here?

The person likely closest to the milestone today is Heather Cox Richardson, who could easily replace her two copy editors with Claude.

Her newsletter reportedly brings in $12 million / year and a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million.

A far cry from 1 billion.

Touching that B will likely require an app with recurring revenue and network effects, that can justify higher revenue multiples.

If it’s doable, it will probably be by:

1. Someone with a Flappy Bird product that goes vertical and sells at the top, or

2. Someone with an Instagram product who both “calls their shot” from the beginning and has the desire + technical ability to follow through on it.

Anything outside of consumer is highly unlikely. Enterprise money comes with enterprise headaches which will absolutely destroy a solo founder.

I’ll explore this more with specific ideas in a future post. Subscribe and follow my journey on Twitter: https://x.com/random

But let’s be honest:

If you’re lucky enough to build something many people love, you’ll want to hire if for no other reason than to make the product as great as it can be.

Maybe there’s a way to do it by only hiring agencies, which technically are a form of automation, but not in the spirit of Sam and Dario’s prediction.

Let’s see! The future is exciting 🚀

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