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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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-
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!
> 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"
Most free versions of things are not as good as paid.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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!"
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...
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.
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
62 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 71.2 ms ] threadBut you won’t have to be beholden to anyone other than the customer.
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.
Do contractors count? Do patent lawyers count?
Do outsourcing services to other companies count?
I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
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.
https://www.andycarnevale.com/blog/one-person-billion-dollar...
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-
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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
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
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.