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I spent the last seven years helping ambitious people navigate the biggest barrier to starting successful companies: finding cofounders.
Back then, cofounders were considered an essential ingredient for starting a startup. Building and selling were each full-time jobs, and there was simply too much for one person to do. Because of this, most successful companies from Facebook to Airbnb had cofounders. That led to the idea of two (or more) cofounders in a garage or dorm room becoming a core part of Silicon Valley romanticism.
You'll notice that I wrote the prior paragraph in the past tense. That’s because things have changed. The amount of human hours required to build something useful and get it in front of customers has collapsed. With AI, it takes less time and money to get started than ever before. This is why, after automation, solo founding will be the default way to start startups.
You don't need to take my word for it. Just look at the data: In the report I collaborated on with Carta, we discovered that the share of solo founders has nearly doubled between 2018 and 2026 to 39 percent of new startups. Startups will soon experience a flippening moment where solo founding goes from odd to ordinary.
This won’t only reduce the barrier to starting a business—it’ll also change the default way that companies will fail. Harvard's Noam Wasserman found that 65 percent of high-potential startups die because of conflict between people, not the product or market. Taking cofounders out of the equation eliminates the main reason that startups die.
But the more interesting topic of discussion is what happens after going solo becomes the default. If the barrier to starting great companies used to be finding or working with cofounders, what will hold back great solo founders from reaching their full potential?
With solo as the default, the main reason startups die will be loneliness. The negative effects of loneliness occur when no one else is close enough to push back on a plan, notice when you're stuck, or simply encourage you to complete the last mile on an exhausting day. AI might be able to help you move faster, but it can’t fully replace another human to vent to or celebrate with.
This creates a new problem to solve. The biggest way to increase the likelihood of solo success is not to add a cofounder of convenience—it's to surround yourself with resources and other solo founders so you can build "solo, together." In a world of increased automation, building a solo company will be more viable than ever, but that doesn’t mean you have to build totally alone.
