Solo Founders
The Solo Founder's Podcast features in-depth interviews with solo founders building remarkable companies. Each week, host Julian Weisser sits down with solo founders who are either operating at serious scale or doing something right now that you need to know about. From Series B and beyond to founders breaking out in real-time, these are the conversations that define what it means to build solo. New episodes every week.
Episodes
Why You Don't Need a Co-Founder to Start | Dave Morin, Offline Ventures
Dave Morin helped launch Facebook Platform, founded Path, co-founded Slow Ventures, and now runs Offline Ventures. He backed Ben Cera fifteen years before Polsia and chairs the OpenClaw Foundation. He calls himself a producer, not an investor, and makes the case that founding is a relational act: most startups fail on relationships, not product, and the only way solo founding fails is bel
5 Solo Founders Called In With Their Hardest Problem | Solo Founders Office Hours
Five solo founders brought their hardest current problem to a live office hours, and Julian worked each one in real time. An open-source app with 1.25 million users and a few hundred paying subscribers. A data product the market "doesn't know it needs." A one-person vendor selling benchmarks to frontier AI labs. A wholesale-ordering startup whose customers keep asking for the wrong featur
Why Investors Say "We Don't Back Solo Founders" (And What They Mean)
About 65% of high-potential startups that fail die from co-founder conflict. Julian, who spent seven years matching co-founders before starting Solo Founders, answers the six questions people ask most about going solo: do you need a co-founder, is it as lonely as it sounds, who has actually done it, how do you raise money alone, do solo founders fail more, and what is "solo founder syndro
No Co-Founder, No Degree, $41.5M to Fix AI Data Centers | Zach Laberge, Omen
Zach Laberge dropped out of high school to build his first company. His second, Omen AI, puts real-time sensors inside the fluids that keep AI data centers and industrial machines running. He's 20, has no co-founder, and has raised $41.5M. He explains why having no technical co-founder forced him to learn spectroscopy himself, and why that made him better.Topics covered:- The shutdown tes
Searching For A Co-Founder Is How You Get A Bad One | 4 VC-Backed Solo Founders
It's been a year since the Solo Founders Program kicked off. Today, the first cohort sits down to discuss building solo, together.What a year of building taught them: why retention is growth (the smile curve, and the leaky bucket nobody checks), why free users are a "free trend" and not a business, how to kill a good idea to find the better one, and what a room full of other founders actu
Non-Technical, No Co-Founder, $100M+ Raised | John Glasgow, Campfire
John Glasgow is the anti-pattern founder: non-technical, 36 when he started, a newborn at home during Y Combinator, and solo after his co-founder left within weeks. After 15 years in corporate finance at Adobe, Fidelity, and Invoice2go, he built Campfire, the AI-native ERP fast-growing companies use to replace legacy systems. This is one of the most tactical conversations we've recorded.T
Why PostHog's 6th Employee Went Solo | Yakko Majuri, Railcode
Companies are handing every employee AI coding tools and calling themselves AI-native — then blocking everything those employees build. Yakko Majuri, early PostHog engineer and infrastructure lead at Doublepoint through its acquisition by Oura, just launched Railcode: a secure home for internal apps and AI agents where you build with your own tools and deploy in seconds. He gives a live d
AI Can Build Your App. It Can't Make It Good. | Paul Bakaus, Impeccable
Paul Bakaus created jQuery UI, sold a startup to Zynga, and spent nearly a decade at Google — then went solo to prove one experienced builder, amplified by AI, can do what used to take a team. His company Renaissance Geek is backed by a16z; its first product, Impeccable, stops AI coding agents from shipping design slop.Topics covered:Why his first hire was a chief of staff, not an enginee
What It Actually Takes To Build a Startup Solo | 6 VC-Backed Successful Solo Founders
Everyone thinks going solo means answering to no one. Six solo founders behind WorkOS, Fondo, Plug, Lighthouse, Hamlet, and Julius AI say the opposite: you have more bosses, not fewer, and the job is convincing all of them. Julian revisits the six moments that deserved more attention the first time around.Topics covered:- Why going solo means more convincing, not less (Rahul Sonwalkar, Ju
She Staffed Her 100k-User Startup With AI Agents | Claire Vo, ChatPRD
Claire Vo runs ChatPRD — an AI "Chief Product Officer" for over 100k product managers — as the only full-time human, bootstrapped, with zero venture capital. The twist: she operates the company with a staff of nine named AI agents she manages like real employees, one of whom emailed the studio before she arrived to coordinate arrival time. She and Julian dig into how she built it, why she
How To Get $1,000 For Your Project, No Strings Attached | Solo Grants
Today we're launching Solo Grants: $100–$1,000 grants, 100% no strings attached, for people building technically ambitious projects solo. Julian sits down with Ari Dutilh who leads the program and is a former grantee himself, to map the wide world of microgrants and explain why the gap between a project seen through and one abandoned is usually just a few hundred dollars.Topics covered:Th
She Raised $18M Solo to Kill AI Slop | Thais Castello Branco, Taste Labs
Thais Castello Branco left the AI search company Exa, raised $18.5M, and built Taste Labs -- the "taste layer for AI" -- solo, with one mission: end AI slop. She and Julian go deep on what taste actually is (and why it isn't personalization), why everything AI makes is starting to look the same, how you turn something as subjective as "great design" into data a model can learn, and the ho
Going Solo Should Be the Rule, Not the Exception | Flo Crivello, Lindy
Flo Crivello raised about $50M as a solo founder, then watched the market kill the company he'd built. Instead of quitting, he cut deep, pivoted, and rebuilt alone into Lindy — one of the top AI agent startups. This is a clear-eyed playbook on knowing when to kill a company, beating burnout with momentum, and building solo without being alone.Topics covered:Raising ~$50M as a solo founder
His Public Company Blew Up. He Came Back Solo. | Francis Davidson, Odessia
Francis Davidson built Sonder into a multi-billion-dollar company, took it public, was pushed out as CEO, and watched it collapse. The same month he left, he started over — this time solo, building Odessia, an AI travel agent, with a founding team of seven. This is the honest version of the comeback: why he went solo when his co-founders were great, why he skipped the MVP, and why he stil
Sold a Company at 16, Raised $3M at 19 | Dhravya Shah, Supermemory
Dhravya Shah sold his first company at 16 and raised $3M at 19 as the solo founder of Supermemory, the open-source memory and context layer for AI agents (now past 26k GitHub stars and 1M+ SDK downloads). The twist: he never chased any of it as a business. He built in public, for free, said no to VCs for nine months, and only raised once the company's vision was undeniable. A conversation
I Asked 5 Massively Successful Founders Why They Went Solo
A $300M company. 30M+ users. Tens of millions in revenue, some raised and some bootstrapped from zero. Software that saves lives. Five founders, zero co-founders.Julian connects the dots across the first six episodes of the show — Ben Cera (Polsia, $30M raised), Yasser Elsaid (Chatbase, $10M ARR bootstrapped), Paul Klein IV (Browserbase, a $300M company), Eugenia Kuyda (Replika, 30M+ user
The Co-Founder "Blood Bond" Is a Myth | Michael Grinich, WorkOS
Michael Grinich built WorkOS solo — now a $2B company and the enterprise infrastructure behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Replit — with no co-founder. So when he says "it's not the blood bond it was made out to be," it lands. This conversation is his case against the ride-or-die co-founder myth, the question he thinks actually matters before you start a company, and the honest bear and bull c
Turning Services Into Software To Move Talent To America | Minn Kim, Lighthouse
Minn Kim runs Lighthouse, the AI-powered immigration firm rebuilding the visa stack for frontier-tech companies. She is solo. She isn't a lawyer. Her first two hires were engineers. The conversation with Julian covers how she got there, why "solve your own problem" isn't always the path to success, the complicated-vs-complex framework she uses to pick what to build, and her bull case for
Fired by His Own Co-Founder, Then Built the #1 Startup Accounting Platform | David Phillips, Fondo
David J. Phillips tried co-founders four times before he went solo. With $40,000 left in the bank after a stalled aquihire, he refounded the company alone — and built Fondo, the accounting platform now used by hundreds of YC and pre-seed startups. The conversation is part founder-confessional, part early-stage GTM playbook.Topics covered:The four co-founder breakups across four prior star
He Quit Tesla, Pivoted GTM 14 Times, Raised $20M Solo | Jimmy Douglas, Plug
The press was declaring the EV car market dead. Roughly $20B in EV investment had been cancelled. The Inflation Reduction Act had just expired. In that environment, Jimmy Douglas raised a $20M Series A from Lightspeed. Before Plug, Jimmy spent five years at Tesla running the largest US EV operation in the world. He left in 2024 to build Plug — the EV-first wholesale marketplace — then spe
The Secret $2 Trillion Market Founders Are Ignoring | Sunil Rajaraman, Hamlet
Two trillion dollars of GDP flows through local government every year. 90%+ of city council votes are pre-decided before the meeting starts. And almost no founder will touch the market. Sunil is the rare exception. He ran for city council in Orinda, California, lost, and walked away with a newsletter for residents and an obsession with how opaque local government actually is. That newslet
Do You Really Need A Co-Founder? With Julian Weisser (Solo Founders)
For the first time ever, more than one in three new companies are being started solo. Five years ago that number was under 25%. This week the host becomes the guest: Julian Weisser — founder of Solo Founders, former co-founder of On Deck (where he ran 27 ODF cohorts and helped over 1,000 founders collectively raise $2B+) — sits down with David J. Phillips (CEO of Fondo, solo founder) for
He Quit Uber, Beat ChatGPT At Harvard, And Went Solo Building AI | Rahul Sonwalkar
Rahul Sonwalker is the solo founder and CEO of Julius AI — the natural-language data analysis platform that took six pivots (and one cease-and-desist from Microsoft for calling a product "Excel Copilot") to find. In this conversation, Rahul breaks down the "co-founder trap" that keeps most smart people stuck searching instead of building, why every great startup violates 1–2 core best pra
$9M ARR, Zero Investors: Yasser Elsaid on Bootstrapping Chatbase as a Solo Founder
Yasser Elsaid was in his last semester of university when he spotted an opportunity most people dismissed: adding custom data to large language models, before ChatGPT even launched. He built the first version of Chatbase in six weeks, got his first Stripe payment 30 minutes after launch, and has bootstrapped to $9M ARR over three years with zero outside funding. In this conversation, he b
Elon Fired Him, Now His AI Writes Every Police Report | Daniel Francis (Abel Police)
Daniel Francis dropped out of high school, taught himself to code at a DC nonprofit, impersonated a laid-off Twitter employee to work for Elon Musk, and then built Abel Police — AI software that generates police reports from body cam footage, saving officers a third of their shift from paperwork. In this conversation, he shares the personal experience that led him to policing, why he beli
30M Users, No Co-Founder | Eugenia Kuyda (Replika, Wabi)
Eugenia Kuyda has spent over a decade building at the frontier of AI consumer products. First by founding Replika in 2014, hitting 30M users in conversational AI before ChatGPT even existed. Now, building Wabi: giving everyone the ability to build personal software. In this episode, she breaks down why she’s repeatedly chosen the solo founder path, why “co-founders by pressure” create lon
How To Fundraise As A Solo Founder | Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures)
Charles Hudson is the founder and managing partner of Precursor Ventures, where he's invested in over 500 companies as a solo GP. He shares a data point that challenges the co-founder consensus: 25-30% of his portfolio companies lose a co-founder before Series A. In this conversation, he explains why talented solo founders beat mismatched teams, the real cost of dead equity, and why you s
From 498 Rejections to a $300M Company | Paul Klein IV (Browserbase)
Paul Klein IV applied to 500 internships and got rejected from 498. Now he's the solo founder of Browserbase – a headless browser infrastructure company for AI agents – valued at $300M in under 14 months. He didn't choose to be a solo founder. He tried to find a co-founder and couldn't. In this conversation, he explains why that turned out to be the right thing.Topics covered:Why Paul thi
1.5M ARR, Zero (Human) Employees | Ben Cera (Polsia)
Ben ran global teams at Travis Kalanick's Cloud Kitchens and left to build Polsia — an AI company builder — completely solo. Now he's hit $1.5M ARR in two weeks with 1,500 companies running on the platform.In this conversation, we explore how his method of building might be the future of solo founding: his 80/20 framework for AI-native companies, why he designed his product after a video
Introducing the Solo Founders Podcast
This is a new show about building companies solo in the age of AI. Six months after launching the Solo Founders program, which has seen founders reach millions in ARR and sell to public companies and governments, this podcast brings together early-stage builders and experienced solo founders to share what's working, what's not, and what it actually looks like to grow a company without co-
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