[HN Gopher] Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar c...
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Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
Author : bizgrayson
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-08-12 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.marcrand.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.marcrand.com)
| ivape wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| You 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.
| rideontime wrote:
| The dream of AI: eliminating all human relationships not
| mediated by a B2B SaaS contract.
| cayleyh wrote:
| I 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| If it were really pulling in that kind of revenue, surely you
| would need/want in house accounting/tax.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'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.
| jibolash wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Everyone can write off their very own Ford Raptor for
| starters
| ivape wrote:
| If you can't imagine the benefits then don't worry about it.
| The jungle ain't for everybody.
| jibolash wrote:
| Okay Tarzan
| CafeRacer wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Oh 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 wrote:
| Ok, 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.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Ok, so you're saying that there were not a single 1B+
| valuation company out there that failed?
| mrkramer wrote:
| Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can probably be made by LLM so if
| you have a good idea for cryptocurrency or some crypto token
| and you can vibe code it with LLM, perhaps it can reach a $1bn
| market cap.
| ttoinou wrote:
| One bug and the value crashes to 0 though
| dgrcode wrote:
| We're definitely closer to the one-person billion dollar
| company than bug free vibe coded software.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| I mean... you can just copy/paste BTC or ETH software, name
| it differently... or get ERC721 and name it something.
|
| Software itself will not make people use it.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Define your terms.
|
| Do contractors count? Do patent lawyers count?
|
| Do outsourcing services to other companies count?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| >Heather Cox Richardson ... could easily replace her two copy
| editors with Claude.
|
| I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| yeah 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| She 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| FrankWilhoit wrote:
| The _only purpose_ of this piece is the gratuitous sideslap at
| Richardson and her individual political stance. First Law of
| Modern Politics: _nothing is about what it says it is about._
| choilive wrote:
| Do athletes count?
| jader201 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I'd posit Messi isn't an entertainer unless you consider him
| playing soccer entertaining by using his athleticism as an
| athelete.
| jader201 wrote:
| If an athlete's money comes primarily from their fame
| and/or ticket sales from spectators, to me that's the
| definition of an entertainer.
| ncruces wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Oculus
| bdcravens wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| This 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_any...
| MattRix wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| viccis wrote:
| Has ConcernedApe ever talked about how much he's made from
| Stardew Valley before? I've seen estimates from $50M to $300M.
| Certainly shy of the $1B mark, but, especially if his next
| project is another solo coded one and does well, he's well on
| his way.
| carnevalem wrote:
| I 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...
| jldugger wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Most 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| This, 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 wrote:
| Minecraft? 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.
| zepolen wrote:
| Well actually....
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of
| Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porser and soon
| after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close
| to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.
|
| 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.
| sunrunner wrote:
| How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early
| days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed?
| It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what
| point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become
| "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".
|
| I'm thinking about
| https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-
| Classic as the Ur-Minecraft.
|
| Edit: Added the missing words
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| > at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned
| become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by
| Microsoft".
|
| 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.
| bspammer wrote:
| Minecraft was already wildly successful before a second
| employee was brought on board. As someone who was a
| teenager at the time, I can tell you that from 2009-2010
| my friends and I talked about little else. None of the
| later updates fundamentally improved on that magic, they
| just added more content.
|
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742163
| hartator wrote:
| Wasn't 100% of the code directly written by Notch until
| 1-year before acquisition?
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| No. Jeb was the main developer from 2011 onwards, the
| moment Minecraft left alpha. Unless there's a time hole I'm
| not aware of that swallowed 2011, 2012, 2013 and most of
| 2014, Notch is pretty much only responsible for the very
| base of the game.
|
| In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game.
| Artists, music, management, and many more.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| Mojang had 20+ employees way back in 2012, and they were
| outsourcing platform ports to other dev companies.
| sunrunner wrote:
| _Chris Sawyer has entered the chat[1]_
|
| [1] Conveniently ignoring the contributions to graphics and
| music of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble, but still...
| ngokevin wrote:
| Stardew Valley?
| sunrunner wrote:
| And to keep the thread going, Undertale (Toby Fox)?
| danaris wrote:
| Undertale not only credits Temmie Chang, it has
| characters based on her in the game.
|
| (There may be others credited; Temmie's the only one I
| can think of off the top of my head.)
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Also not so sure that it's a billion-dollar game.
|
| 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.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| If you're going to forget that his girlfriend worked two
| jobs for 5 years to even support him being able to do that,
| yeah, he was "alone". Just like trust fund startup bros
| make it "alone" (with the 500k their parents gave them).
| bko wrote:
| Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard
| work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6
| figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with
| it.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| >Couldn't ever do it alone without having someone (that
| loves him) sacrificing so much for him.
|
| >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?
| preommr wrote:
| I am curious which of the following (if any) you would
| define as alone:
|
| 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.
| ysavir wrote:
| Don't forget:
|
| 5) One person with a copper mine and a soldering gun.
| margalabargala wrote:
| None of these. Even the guy who runs the Primitive
| Technology youtube channel, building up technology solo
| from literal sticks and rocks he gathers himself, would
| not be alone, because he did not too personally
| manufacture the digital camera he uses to record himself
| creating these things.
|
| Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything
| alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from
| the primordial soup?
|
| /s
| dlivingston wrote:
| You're making some meta-point about "aloneness" where
| it's disqualified if they have some pre-existing
| threshold of wealth or connections. I disagree that's
| disqualifying, especially because you can play that game
| all the way to the bottom.
|
| 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.
| aakkaakk wrote:
| And some go broke 4 times even with a billion from their
| parents. And still claims a win!
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| That's just semantics. I worked as a car salesman, saved
| over $250k, and quit to become a self taught saas guy and
| my php jquery mess now supports me.
|
| 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?
| dandellion wrote:
| I bought the alpha for 10 euro when it was just one dude
| posting on a forum and I can tell you it was very much
| already Minecraft and going viral.
| bspammer wrote:
| I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for
| certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and
| continued to work on the game himself, I'm very confident
| it would have eventually made a billion. The core game
| hasn't changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely
| captivating in those early days.
| bspammer wrote:
| Found this thread from around that time, it's fun to read
| now:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Minecraft swung past the $10 million in sales mark, and was
| well on it's way to the $100 million mark, when he hired his
| first employee. It's not _impossible_ that it would have hit
| a valuation of $1 billion without hiring on additional
| employees.
| pphysch wrote:
| Building a global network requires not just building a
| successful product, but exporting that product to different
| geographic markets & cultures. Core product team might be 1 AI
| enabled developer, but what about all the other dimensions of a
| successful global enterprise?
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible
| if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
|
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| > arbitrage opportunity
|
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after
| some amount of time
|
| 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 "
| amelius wrote:
| Missing the feature of being free (as in libre) makes most
| paid-for software actually crappy in comparison.
|
| But maybe other things matter more to you, that is possible
| of course.
| tikhonj wrote:
| There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi
| or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever
| become household names because they're not driven to grow and
| build a monopoly at all costs, they're driven to build and sell
| very specific software to very specific organizations.
| iroddis wrote:
| The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the
| core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-
| disk columnar database. I don't know if it counts as being
| commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to
| learn the language is still quite high.
| jlarocco wrote:
| > Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after
| some amount of time.
|
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| J. K. Rowling?
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| And Satoshi.
| hardtke wrote:
| It's already almost happened with Plenty of Fish. Mostly a one
| person company, acquired for over $500M.
| burkaman wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| Let's recognize the REAL way this is achieved is by devaluing the
| dollar into the dirt. Well on our way!
| godelski wrote:
| The 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
| pryelluw wrote:
| So, 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 wrote:
| you still have to find the nugget in the first place
| TrackerFF wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| To 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 wrote:
| yep, 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 wrote:
| The $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.
| trhway wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| Funny 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 wrote:
| I 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
| MattRix wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| 1 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
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Who 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 wrote:
| This is the new version of "you are just not rich because you did
| not put effort enough" usually said by Bateman-like guys
| swyx wrote:
| i 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
| siva7 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Lol 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.
| amirhirsch wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| It'll happen through hyper-inflation.
| Kiro wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Aside 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-0ad082a52a...
| nvch wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Instagram was bought for a billion dollars with a team of 13
| people, so $10 billion with a team of 10 sounds possible.
| siva7 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| And 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.
| tikhonj wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Didn'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 wrote:
| I 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...
| switz wrote:
| Most 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 wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Why is that even a thing people talk about?
| jibolash wrote:
| Because too many people take Sam Altman's takes too seriously
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5vsEUgxt3E
| viktorcode wrote:
| I'm sorry, but outside of venture capital world one person
| billion dollars company already happened. Remember Minecraft?
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Every 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?
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