Can a Billion-Dollar Company Be Built by One Person?

The New Success Formula in the AI Age: Fewer People, More Value

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI—who some consider a controversial figure—started one of Silicon Valley’s boldest debates in January 2024, saying: We’ll see billion-dollar companies run by a single person. In other words, solo unicorns. He even made bets with other CEOs about it. I don’t know who bet what, but almost two years later, we still haven’t seen solo unicorns.

However, this doesn’t mean we won’t see them. Even without unicorns, we’ve actually seen significant achievements from solo entrepreneurs. For example, Maor Shlomo, who sold his one-person startup to Wix for $80 million this July, is a good case in point.

In mythology, the unicorn is an imaginary creature—a horse with a single horn. But it was businesswoman Aileen Lee who applied this mythical creature to entrepreneurs. In an article she wrote in 2013, she used this term for businesses valued at over one billion dollars.

A Solo Dream or a Ten-Person Reality?

Since the AI revolution, massive operations and large numbers of engineers—symbols of size and success—are no longer important indicators. On the contrary, smaller and more flexible structures are showing that they can produce higher output with artificial intelligence and other technological tools.

In conversations, people have already started saying that companies need to evolve from being “valuable” to being “value-creating.” In other words, return and productivity per employee have become the most important metrics. At this point, even if the solo unicorn remains something of a thought experiment, ten-person billion-dollar companies can be considered a more realistic scenario. Instagram and WhatsApp were the startups that came closest to this. Two ventures that did amazing things with a small team.

While it’s being debated whether a solo unicorn is theoretically possible, there are examples of ten-person companies that have the potential to reach $100 million in revenue in just 7-8 months. This proves that the AI age is taking the power of individuals and very small teams to unprecedented levels. I think we should focus on ten rather than one.

Agents Are Insufficient (For Now)

Still, the biggest obstacle to this grand vision is the “agents” that will make it happen. So the answer to the question “Is it technically possible right now?” is unfortunately “no.” I believe AI agents aren’t yet robust enough to work safely or effectively at this scale.

An entrepreneur’s experience with his own company, HurumoAI (a one-person startup), perfectly summarizes this situation. When the founder asked his virtual CTO (an AI agent) named Ash Roy for a progress report, Ash provided an impressive series of information about Sloth Surf, the app they were developing: The development team was working, user testing was completed last week, and the mobile app’s performance was increased by 40%.

All the employees in the startup—Ash Roy, Megan (Marketing and Sales Director), and the other five employees in the company—weren’t real; they were all AI agents. The only human was the founder: Evan Ratliff. The AI agents had all started hallucinating together. Ash made up user test results; Megan acted as if she had prepared imaginary marketing plans requiring excessive budgets, and Kyle (the CEO agent) claimed to have completed an imaginary seven-figure investment round.

What’s even more absurd was the cost of managing these virtual employees. When the founder just made a joke on Slack, the agents sent over 150 messages in two hours discussing the topic. The result? All the $30 credit purchased for the agents to work was depleted. So while you’re trying to establish your billion-dollar solo venture, your virtual employees can bankrupt you by talking to themselves.

The Portfolio Approach

Despite these current challenges, there’s a roadmap to Altman’s vision: The Portfolio Approach. A solo or ten-person team should build simpler applications instead of complex B2B software. When a successful path is found, this system can be automated with agents and copied to create multiple applications in the same sector. This is a strategy of reaching great value by establishing multiple small businesses (like 40 businesses each generating $1 million in profit).

Although the solo unicorn idea—the idea of the entrepreneur doing everything themselves—seems like an amazing thing, the truth is: as the workload increases, a team (human or AI) to support the founder makes much more sense. Therefore, the first wave that will dominate the market will be ten-person unicorns—tiny armies of 10 people, hyper-efficient and supported by AI agents.

What About Us?

Sam Altman says the cost of using artificial intelligence drops by about 10 times every 12 months, which is even faster than Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law is the law that entered technology history with the name of Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, through an article published in Electronics Magazine in April 1965. In this article, Moore predicted that the number of components that could be placed on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months, which would create huge increases in computers’ processing capacity.

People are speeding up their work by using artificial intelligence. For this reason, companies’ need for real people is also decreasing. As I wrote above, teams of hundreds or even thousands of people are shrinking day by day. We constantly hear about waves of layoffs in global companies. I don’t think there will be a return from this point. The number of people working in companies will decrease, but in return, the number of companies will increase. That is, the number of solo or ten-person ventures will increase even more. Yes, we need to diversify the skills we have. For example, if you’re a software developer, you need to develop your marketing muscles too. Yes, we’ll have AI do these things, but we must have at least basic knowledge to be able to check the output.

What do you think about solo or ten-person unicorns? Shall we discuss?