Solo Founders

Six solo founders on the question underneath every startup: how do you choose a company you'll still want to be running in ten years? Julian revisits conversations with Dhravya Shah (Supermemory), Francis Davidson (Odessia), Thais Castello Branco (Taste Labs), Flo Crivello (Lindy), Claire Vo (ChatPRD), and Paul Bakaus (Impeccable), and pulls one idea from each that deserved more spotlight. Topics...

Shivani Poddar led engineering on Google DeepMind's autonomous coding agent. Then she went solo to build Fo — the personal agent whose viral launch admitted what no AI lab will: AI often can't finish the job alone, so her agent hires vetted humans and picks up the phone itself. A decade of building assistants at Alexa, Meta, and DeepMind, distilled into the sharpest product thesis of the agent era...

Ali Ansari never had a co-founder - he didn't know they existed. In this episode, the micro1 founder tells Julian how he went from selling his dad's shoes on eBay at 12 to deleting his profitable AI recruiting business and going all-in on training data for frontier AI labs. Topics covered: - The three signals it's time to move on from a business - Deleting $7M in run rate, and why only founders ca...

Sara Du co-founded Alloy Automation at 19 and ran it for five and a half years. Her second company, Ando, she's building solo: team messaging designed from scratch for humans and AI agents working together, freshly out of stealth with a $20M seed from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence Capital. A conversation about why agents are locked out of the tools teams live in, and what founding looks lik...

James Clift hasn't been employed by a company he didn't own since he was sixteen. He paid for a year of university with a window-cleaning business, bought VisualCV as a $100K legacy resume site and rebuilt it (sold 2020), then went solo at South Park Commons and founded Durable, where about 3.5 million people have signed up to start or run a business, more than half of them brand new, on a six-eng...

Dave Morin helped launch Facebook Platform, founded Path, co-founded Slow Ventures, and now runs Offline Ventures. He backed Ben Cera fifteen years before Polsia and chairs the OpenClaw Foundation. He calls himself a producer, not an investor, and makes the case that founding is a relational act: most startups fail on relationships, not product, and the only way solo founding fails is believing "s...

Five solo founders brought their hardest current problem to a live office hours, and Julian worked each one in real time. An open-source app with 1.25 million users and a few hundred paying subscribers. A data product the market "doesn't know it needs." A one-person vendor selling benchmarks to frontier AI labs. A wholesale-ordering startup whose customers keep asking for the wrong features. A rob...

About 65% of high-potential startups that fail die from co-founder conflict. Julian, who spent seven years matching co-founders before starting Solo Founders, answers the six questions people ask most about going solo: do you need a co-founder, is it as lonely as it sounds, who has actually done it, how do you raise money alone, do solo founders fail more, and what is "solo founder syndrome." Topi...

Zach Laberge dropped out of high school to build his first company. His second, Omen AI, puts real-time sensors inside the fluids that keep AI data centers and industrial machines running. He's 20, has no co-founder, and has raised $41.5M. He explains why having no technical co-founder forced him to learn spectroscopy himself, and why that made him better. Topics covered: - The shutdown test: how...

It's been a year since the Solo Founders Program kicked off. Today, the first cohort sits down to discuss building solo, together. What a year of building taught them: why retention is growth (the smile curve, and the leaky bucket nobody checks), why free users are a "free trend" and not a business, how to kill a good idea to find the better one, and what a room full of other founders actually get...

John Glasgow is the anti-pattern founder: non-technical, 36 when he started, a newborn at home during Y Combinator, and solo after his co-founder left within weeks. After 15 years in corporate finance at Adobe, Fidelity, and Invoice2go, he built Campfire, the AI-native ERP fast-growing companies use to replace legacy systems. This is one of the most tactical conversations we've recorded. Topics co...

Companies are handing every employee AI coding tools and calling themselves AI-native — then blocking everything those employees build. Yakko Majuri, early PostHog engineer and infrastructure lead at Doublepoint through its acquisition by Oura, just launched Railcode: a secure home for internal apps and AI agents where you build with your own tools and deploy in seconds. He gives a live demo — Rai...

Paul Bakaus created jQuery UI, sold a startup to Zynga, and spent nearly a decade at Google — then went solo to prove one experienced builder, amplified by AI, can do what used to take a team. His company Renaissance Geek is backed by a16z; its first product, Impeccable, stops AI coding agents from shipping design slop. Topics covered: Why his first hire was a chief of staff, not an engineer (the...

Everyone thinks going solo means answering to no one. Six solo founders behind WorkOS, Fondo, Plug, Lighthouse, Hamlet, and Julius AI say the opposite: you have more bosses, not fewer, and the job is convincing all of them. Julian revisits the six moments that deserved more attention the first time around. Topics covered: - Why going solo means more convincing, not less (Rahul Sonwalkar, Julius AI...

Claire Vo runs ChatPRD — an AI "Chief Product Officer" for over 100k product managers — as the only full-time human, bootstrapped, with zero venture capital. The twist: she operates the company with a staff of nine named AI agents she manages like real employees, one of whom emailed the studio before she arrived to coordinate arrival time. She and Julian dig into how she built it, why she runs nin...

Today we're launching Solo Grants: $100–$1,000 grants, 100% no strings attached, for people building technically ambitious projects solo. Julian sits down with Ari Dutilh who leads the program and is a former grantee himself, to map the wide world of microgrants and explain why the gap between a project seen through and one abandoned is usually just a few hundred dollars. Topics covered: The Solo...

Thais Castello Branco left the AI search company Exa, raised $18.5M, and built Taste Labs -- the "taste layer for AI" -- solo, with one mission: end AI slop. She and Julian go deep on what taste actually is (and why it isn't personalization), why everything AI makes is starting to look the same, how you turn something as subjective as "great design" into data a model can learn, and the honest case...

Flo Crivello raised about $50M as a solo founder, then watched the market kill the company he'd built. Instead of quitting, he cut deep, pivoted, and rebuilt alone into Lindy — one of the top AI agent startups. This is a clear-eyed playbook on knowing when to kill a company, beating burnout with momentum, and building solo without being alone. Topics covered: Raising ~$50M as a solo founder Knowin...

Francis Davidson built Sonder into a multi-billion-dollar company, took it public, was pushed out as CEO, and watched it collapse. The same month he left, he started over — this time solo, building Odessia, an AI travel agent, with a founding team of seven. This is the honest version of the comeback: why he went solo when his co-founders were great, why he skipped the MVP, and why he still thinks...

Dhravya Shah sold his first company at 16 and raised $3M at 19 as the solo founder of Supermemory, the open-source memory and context layer for AI agents (now past 26k GitHub stars and 1M+ SDK downloads). The twist: he never chased any of it as a business. He built in public, for free, said no to VCs for nine months, and only raised once the company's vision was undeniable. A conversation about wh...

A $300M company. 30M+ users. Tens of millions in revenue, some raised and some bootstrapped from zero. Software that saves lives. Five founders, zero co-founders. Julian connects the dots across the first six episodes of the show — Ben Cera (Polsia, $30M raised), Yasser Elsaid (Chatbase, $10M ARR bootstrapped), Paul Klein IV (Browserbase, a $300M company), Eugenia Kuyda (Replika, 30M+ users), Dani...

Michael Grinich built WorkOS solo — now a $2B company and the enterprise infrastructure behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Replit — with no co-founder. So when he says "it's not the blood bond it was made out to be," it lands. This conversation is his case against the ride-or-die co-founder myth, the question he thinks actually matters before you start a company, and the honest bear and bull case for g...

Minn Kim runs Lighthouse, the AI-powered immigration firm rebuilding the visa stack for frontier-tech companies. She is solo. She isn't a lawyer. Her first two hires were engineers. The conversation with Julian covers how she got there, why "solve your own problem" isn't always the path to success, the complicated-vs-complex framework she uses to pick what to build, and her bull case for solo foun...

David J. Phillips tried co-founders four times before he went solo. With $40,000 left in the bank after a stalled aquihire, he refounded the company alone — and built Fondo, the accounting platform now used by hundreds of YC and pre-seed startups. The conversation is part founder-confessional, part early-stage GTM playbook. Topics covered: The four co-founder breakups across four prior startups Re...

The press was declaring the EV car market dead. Roughly $20B in EV investment had been cancelled. The Inflation Reduction Act had just expired. In that environment, Jimmy Douglas raised a $20M Series A from Lightspeed. Before Plug, Jimmy spent five years at Tesla running the largest US EV operation in the world. He left in 2024 to build Plug — the EV-first wholesale marketplace — then spent two ye...