The Solo Flippening: How 1-in-3 Startups Broke the Co-Founder Myth | Julian Weisser

66% of the companies that fail in the early days fail because they have co-founder conflicts. The startups now have been going on for over 5 decades. If you actually look at the history of Silicon Valley, it's over 50 years now since the first sort of tech startup. It's 50 years of this. And this is the first time ever that over 1 in 3 companies that started is started by a solo founder.

You've done a full report on this in partnership with Carta. What were some of the surprising things in there?

The funny thing is, so we've been working with Carta for years at ODF, and they've always been really supportive. And I think that they have some of the most interesting data on startups. The thing that was most interesting going into this was I said, hey, we're doing solo founders. We have the Solo Founders Program. We have a community of solo founders. You're part of it. And we said, well, let's do a report to really understand what is the actual current state of solo founders.

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Awesome to see you. You made it. Yeah, I was like— With a Guinness nonetheless.

It's actually an old Rasputin.

Old Rasputin?

I've been told that I actually resemble Rasputin. I love it.

You can slightly see the resemblance, the hair.

I don't know if that's a compliment, but I'll take it, you know?

He was a legend.

We have to try and like do our own thing and be unique, right? Why be anybody else? They'll all take it, right?

Exactly. Well, it's really awesome to have you here, Julian. We've got Julian, the founder and CEO of Solo Founders and ODF. Um, you released a really special, uh, report today and would love to just jump into it. Uh, the State of Solo Founders. So yeah, tell us about what you're up to in this report.

Well, I mean, uh, I would, I think we should say that we released a report today because you're in it. I'm in it? Yeah, you're, you're part of it. Okay. I guess so. Uh, you're, you're part of it and, uh, you're a contributor to it and, and ultimately you're part of the inspiration for why we do what we do with Solo Founders. You know, the reason that we started Solo Founders is because we saw that there was really this bias against solo founders that we felt was both a bad bias because it prevented great companies from getting started. But also it caused people to have what we call co-founders of convenience, where they end up getting co-founders just because they think that that's what's necessary in order to be taken seriously or to raise money or to get into an accelerator. And ultimately, you know, we felt that the best thing you could do is to say to people, hey, just get started. Try and work on your company on your own, especially now with all the tools that are available to you and all the resources. You really don't necessarily need a co-founder. Now, that's not to say that if you can't find an incredible co-founder, You shouldn't consider having them. But when you know the fact that 66% of the companies that fail in the early days fail because they have co-founder conflicts, you really want to make sure that you're doing it for the right reasons and not just because you think that that's what somebody wants you to have. You have to do it because it's the absolute best thing for your company and it's worth the potential downside risk. For very many circumstances, that downside risk is not worth it and it's much better to be solo.

Wow. And so you've done a full report on this in partnership with Carta. Um, so let's talk about the report. Yeah. What, what were some of the surprising things in there?

Well, I think the, uh, the funny thing is, so we've been working with Carta for years at ODF. Um, and they've always been really supportive. And I think that they have some of the most interesting data on startups. The, uh, the thing that was most interesting going into this was I said, hey, we're doing solo founders. We have the solo founders program. We have a community of solo founders. You're part of it. And we said, well, let's do a report to really understand what is the actual current state of solo founders. Not to say that we think that it's going to look great. Yeah, I didn't know. I said, maybe it's going to be 1 in 10 founders are solo founders, or maybe they just aren't raising very much money, or maybe they're, maybe the valuations are really low and it's a bad, a bad picture for solo founders right now. I said that would be fine, right? Because ultimately we think that this is going to change over time. What we actually got was really surprising, which was that the state of solo founders is, is incredible and it's getting even better. So the biggest stat, and now this is crazy if you think about it, because we've been seeing startups now have been going on for over 5 decades, right? If you actually look at the history of Silicon Valley, it's over 50 years now since the first sort of like tech startups, 50 years of this. And this is the first time, this is the first year ever In the history of technology startups that companies, uh, are getting more, more and more companies are getting started by solo founders is the first time ever that over 1 in 3 companies that started is started by a solo founder. First time. And in, in 2019, it was under 25%. So we went from under 25% to over 1/3 in 6 years. That's incredible. And I think that's a really big change. And I think it's a, it's a sign of what's to come because it wasn't like it spiked all of a sudden. It was just 25% until, you know, the last year and then AI kind of blew it up. It's just been a steady rise. So it really begs the question, when are we going to see the flippening happen? Right? When is it actually going to be the default to be a solo founder versus, you know, have co-founders? And I think that that's going to happen much sooner than most people anticipate.

Wow. And so in 4 years, we went from 25— sorry, what was the percentage?

6 years to—

6 years.

From 24% to 36%. Wow. Started by solo founders.

And what are some of the big re— what is driving that?

Yeah. Well, I mean, the main thing of course is AI. Uh, but the second thing is the fact that people are starting to see that the narrative is crumbling a little bit. The narrative that you need to have a co-founder. You're seeing great companies like Vercel. Midjourney, right? Polymarket. These are really massive companies. And then of course you're seeing other companies, um, that are incredibly influential in the startup ecosystem. Vondo is a great example, right? Um, Wander. Uh, there are so many great companies that are getting started by solo founders and it just shows you that it's possible, right? So part of the report, the goal of the report was to say, here is what it looks like right now. From a data perspective, but also here's what it looks like now from a commentary perspective from solo founders and also investors who back solo founders. And I think that having your commentary, having commentary from, you know, dozen plus founders and investors really adds to it because it's not just about the data. It's about what is it actually like to be a solo founder right now? What is it like as an investor to think about investing in a solo founder? Versus multiple, you know, co-founders. I thought there was something really interesting that Charles Hudson says in the report. Charles has been, he's probably like the OG pre-seed investor.

Shout out Charles Hudson, Precursor Ventures.

Yeah, he's incredible. And, you know, he, um, he said something I thought was very interesting, which was he feels like the platonic ideal is 2 co-founders who have a really long working relationship. They've known each other. They really understand each other's motivations, the drawbacks of working with each other, the things that make them difficult to work with, the things that make them great. But the second best thing, and the, and he said the third isn't even close, is a really talented solo founder. And the reality is, if you're looking at co-founder pairs, it's very infrequent that you have that dynamic that he described. So the, the co-founders, when he's actually looking at them, They usually fall, uh, well beneath in terms of the rankings, uh, to a solo founder. Because a solo founder, you know, you're only taking risk on one person. And ultimately, you just have to evaluate, is that one person going to be in it to win? And are they going to not be discouraged or are they going to keep going? And if that's the case, that's great. With co-founders, you really have to determine what happens if this thing blows up. You know, will one of them be there still? How will that actually work? Will they be able to make it through? And obviously companies have co-founder breakups and they don't kill the company, but it's kind of a coin flip. So it's much better to focus on, is this one person driven? Will they be able to build a great team? And another thing that was in the report that I thought was really fascinating, uh, you might've met Eugenia from, uh, from Wabi and she's, uh, that's her new company. She previously built Replica, which is really at the forefront of AI. And this idea of AI being something that wasn't just a tool, it was actually something that you could build a relationship with and be conversant with. And she was really ahead of her time for that. And I think she's ahead of her time now with building, making a product that allows essentially a graphical user interface for people to build apps on their phone. Um, you know, it's like Replit is an incredible product. I'm a big fan of it. But what Wabi does is it makes it so that, you know, somebody's parents, somebody who doesn't know anything about code, Doesn't have to think about code. It just builds it on their phone in their little Wabi app. And she said something I thought was absolutely fascinating, which was when you have co-founders and you have a co-founder and CEO, and then you have the founding team, there's actually 3 layers, right? There's the layer of the CEO, there's the layer of the co-founders, and then there's the layer of the founding team. And she says that that middle layer. Creates a lot of instability sometimes. When it goes well, obviously it could be quite good, but she believes that if you could actually just have it be the CEO and the founding team, the founding team gets a lot more close to the CEO. They have a lot more ownership because all that ownership that would be distributed to maybe 1 or 2 other co-founders is now going, could potentially go to, you know, 10 other people. It just means that there is just such a better economic situation for those people, but also a, a better sort of, um, relationship situation where those people aren't thought of as the third tier. They're thought of as, you know, the, the, the part of the true partnership. And obviously a partnership needs a leader. So, so it makes sense that there's a CEO, but it creates this dynamic that she thinks is a lot more beautiful, um, than having the 3, the 3 layers. So, so I thought that was something. And again, we sat down with so many people and did these in-depth interviews with them. We learned so much. We thought we knew a lot about solo founders, but we knew that we didn't know nearly everything that there was out there. And there's still so much to learn, but the report starts to shed a lot of light on things that we hadn't even considered.

Amazing. Where can we find the report?

Yeah. So we, um, we have solofounders.com, which I think is, uh, just, you know, a really killer domain.

Yeah. Let's not sell me.

Yeah. We, uh, we have Solo—

tweet the link on the screen.

Let me hold up my old Rasmussen here. Hold on.

Let's do it one more time. One more time.

Yeah.

Yeah. We gotta get the cheeky plank.

I gotta have the old Rasmussen because, you know, again, the, uh, the, the likeness, right? Um, but the, uh, the, the, the thing is we have solofounders.com. Um, if you go to solofounders.com, you can find it off the homepage or you can do backslash report.

And hold on, I need to tweet this.

Cool. solofounders.com/report. And, you know, our goal is to, uh, is to really just increase the amount of successful startups out there in the world. And the reason that we're doing that isn't because we actually believe that solo founders are the only way to create great companies or something like that. But we believe that if we can remove constraints on people starting great companies, more great companies will be started, which is a benefit for the world. but it's also a benefit for the individual because ultimately we think of these things as a, as an art form, as a form of self-expression. And if you can actually go and be successful at expressing yourself and building a great company that solves a real problem for people, that just does good in so many different ways. So that's why we do what we do. Uh, ODF continues, you know, people come to ODF, they potentially find collaborators. Collaborators. Um, yeah, I think that somebody in the most recent, uh, YC batch found their co-founder through ODF. Uh, but, you know, ultimately—

There's so many amazing stories through that, right? You're on your 27th cohort.

27th, yeah.

And, uh, it's been, it's been incredible to watch, join, watch ODF grow. And something interesting happened in the last batch. Um, there was a flippening.

Yeah. So, so we were just talking about like, when is the FICARTA number going to go from 36% of companies that are started are solo to over 50%? And, you know, I was checking in with people who did the last cohort. Because the 27th is the one that's coming up of ODF. I checked in with people who were doing the last cohort of ODF, ODF 26, about a month after we wrapped the cohort, we had a barbecue at the house and we had about maybe 30 people come to the barbecue. And I was shocked because about half of them said that they were now defaulting to solo. And before the, uh, the cohort, many of them hadn't even had solo as an option on their radar. Right. You know, and I think that that's really important and that's, I think that what we do is, is very much advocacy, right? It's not to say that you need to be solo. It's to say that you should really consider it because ultimately, um, it makes— means that you can no longer have an excuse to not get started. You should just get started. Uh, and it also means that, you know, ultimately if you find a great partner, that's good, but you also can make a lot of progress. And if you make a lot of progress and actually solve a real problem in the world, Not only is it good for the world, but you probably end up having something that you're really proud of in the process as well.

Amazing. And for the people who are deciding, I'm going solo, you have a really amazing program for solo founders. So tell us about the program and, and maybe one of the companies that recently came out.

Yeah. So it's, um, it's really funny. Uh, I think that the, uh, the Solo Founders Program is something that I had not really anticipated quite just how impactful it would be for people. Um, when I started it, it was because I had been working with a bunch of solo founders. I really enjoyed working with solo founders because I felt like it was, it was beneficial for them to have somebody who had some like higher degree of context than maybe an investor. Um, but wasn't day to day as like a co-founder or anything like that. And I enjoyed that level of sort of connection with them. They seem to enjoy it. And when I said, you know, okay, we should do more with solo founders. They said, well, We can't really do a coworking space because coworking isn't really how startups get started because you don't clock out at a startup. It's just all encompassing, right? Um, so that's why a lot of the best startups are usually built at people's homes when they're getting started, right? Or their apartments. So I said, okay, so we can't do just coworking. So we're going to do like a residency type thing. So that's kind of where we went. And then ultimately, Um, we started the residency, uh, it's called, it's called Solo Founders Program. Again, solofounders.com has all this info. And when we got there, um, we started to have the first cohort, which is only 6 people, which I think is very different than a lot of things. You know, it's like, it's really trying to be a small group instead of it. I think there's a lot of value. ODF has 90 people per cohort, right? So I love large groups as well, but I think there's a lot of value in the small group aspect of it. Because what people describe it as, and I had never predicted they would say this, they said, it's like I have 5 co-founders, but we're all working on our own companies because they all have context. They all care, but ultimately they don't have to argue with me. We don't have to have this back, like this real battle to make a decision, um, which ultimately sometimes can be constructive and helpful to have that type of battle. But I think it's like this healthy degree of context and care. And, and knowledge, um, and advice and support while also letting people do their own thing. And that has been something that's really phenomenal. You know, there, there've been a lot of great, uh, great folks who did the Solo Founders Program. One of them actually just got into the, um, the upcoming YC batch. Another one, uh, got to a million ARR in just 2 months. Um, and then, and again, like we only have 6, the most recent batch had 7 people. Um, in it, but you know, it's, it's very small. And the idea is to really help people kind of figure out where they are and go on their timeline. We don't do demo days or anything like that because we're so small. Um, the goal is to help people where they are. So, you know, some people will end up joining maybe an accelerator. Some people will raise money. Some people, I mean, the company that raised or that, that got to a million ARR, they're so profitable that in theory they don't need to raise. They probably will because I think it's a great market. And they want to sort of like get to a dominant place in that market, but they don't need to. They could be a profitable company that exits for $100 million in 2 years. But I think that the founder is just really interested in this idea of how big can this get? How much of an impact can this have? Because I won't give away what they're working on, but they say, you know, when I walk around the world and I see like the impact in my work, I'd feel really proud of that. And I'd really, really excited about it. So Ultimately, our goal with the Solo Founders Program is to give you this space to live and work alongside of all of these other solo founders and have that almost pseudo co-founder type relationship. And then we work together a lot afterwards too, right? Um, is we have group office hours every, every week after the cohorts wrap. We, the first cohort wrapped maybe 6, uh, 4 or 5 months ago and we're still doing it, right?

That's incredible.

Um, and, and it's great and it's amazing to see the progress.

That's amazing. And so when is the next Solo Founders?

It starts, uh, late January.

And can people apply right now?

We just sent out our first offer. We're technically not interviewing people, um, but it was a person who had already done ODF and they reached out and we figured they needed to expedite it because of a bit, a bunch of travel considerations. So we, we help people with their visas for this. About half the people, about half the people are immigrants who do the program. That's

incredible. Wow. I mean, you have such incredible alumni of ODF. You have incredible alumni of Solo Founders now. I think every, where can we find you online? I think every investor, every founder needs to follow you. I mean, well, you can just follow me on Twitter.

Twitter, but you know, the solofounders.com and off of there you've got our Twitter handle, which is Solo Founding. We are we're all about solo founders. We we still run ODF, and we really care about it. It's it's gotten to a point where it's just like been very successful for us. But ultimately, we we think that we the best thing that we can do to help more people start the best companies right now is to help them focus on you know really ultimately going out there. And, uh, and getting started.

Love it. Thank you so much for joining, Julian. Always great to see you.

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