Solo Founder

“I do think like one of the big struggles being a solo founder is you don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of. So you just arrive at conclusions a lot slower.”

“And then now it's like, actually what would take a week or a month or a year, like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours, or, you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 to 40,000 lines of code. Like what would take a typi…”

“AI in general unlocks a lot of potential in people who didn't know how to write code. So in, in recent years, we've seen a number of startups that are rising from, you know, from the ground up with like solo founders using AI agents, like 10 different AI agent…”

“Once you start to raise your entire day for weeks or months on end is going to be going and reaching out to investors. So you won't be able to talk to customers and you won't be able to have meetings with your team.”

“Back in the day, there was no solo founder. You needed technical chops, you needed designers. The idea of a solo founder was a pipe dream, but today I think the idea of a solo founder is actually the default.”

“If you're building, like, a B to B company, especially if you're, like, doing a B to enterprise company, like, you'll need to hire a salesperson or a sales team, like, you need to, like, spend your money on marketing. It's going to be very hard to try to sell …”

“As a solo founder, you remove this alignment step within co-founders where you have, we have several co-founders. Often the co-founders have to get aligned and then you get aligned to the rest of the company. So when you're a solo founder, It's just you and th…”

“Like, right now, you may even need to, like, hire a developer to build the platform and all the features, but, like, pretty soon, that's, like, if you've seen, like, Vercel's, like, vzero.dev, it will, like, design and build it for you. Like, just fast forward…”

“I think Silicon Valley has finally lost its stigma a little bit against solo founders. For a long time, YC and stuff were like, you have to have co-founders.”

“The amount of leverage now is, like, if you're, if you have a good idea, like, you can create the equivalent of, like, you know, a hundred percent company by yourself. You know, it was just some, like, random, like, just a handful of, like, no-code tools and s…”

“If it's a solo founder with no team and no plan, and if they're gone, you know, the business is hosed. Well, that that's a problem. But if it's somebody, a founder who's built up a team and they're ready to step out, then that, Adds value to the business.”

“Yes, we fund a lot of solo founders. I think we actually fund more solo founders than two person teams which is the opposite of most, you know, accelerators and most venture funds.”

“When you're the solo founder, essentially there's just so much more that you're just carrying the weight of, and it has to be that way, right? Like you can't you can't have it any other way. Even if you hire someone to do the work did the equity splits and thi…”

“In the early days, what I say for single founders is, you kind of have, like, if you're swimming in the ocean, it's kind of like a net buoy system, so you have to find, like, three or six people that are, like, those orange buoys, and you're swimming by yourse…”

“I think the hardest part is morale. There's no one, there's, like, if you have multiple people, they keep one another going when things are going badly, and there's no one to cheer you up.”

“I would not try and start a startup just with just myself as the founder. I don't think I could do it.”

“Honestly, being, you know a solo founder is, is better and less distracting than having a complicated or, you know, fraught co-founder relationship.”

“So we funded solo founders you know, and some of them have done really well, but overall we've seen this pattern where it's just so hard as a solo founder.”

“Yes, we fund solo founders, like tons of them every batch.”

“So at Forward Partners, we tend to take people that are in, in the main solo founders who, you know, tend to be non-technical.”

“I definitely am not interested in solo founders.”

“We don't accept that many proportionally to the numbers that apply because there's so much to do in a startup.”