Podcast · Business

Solo Founders

by Solo Founders · English · Business

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 founde

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 58 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

He Sold His Dad's Shoes on eBay at 12. At 25 He Built a $4B Company Solo. | Ali Ansari, micro1

Ali Ansari never had a co-founder - he didn't know they existed. In this episode, the micro1 founder tells Julian how he went from selling his dad's shoes on eBay at 12 to deleting his profitable AI recruiting business and going all-in on training data for frontier AI labs. Topics covered: - The three signals it's time to move on from a business - Deleting $7M in run rate, and why only founders can inject risk - Solo by default: building a founding team instead of hunting for a co-founder - micro1's async culture: open threads, final actions, no meetings - The Spirit Airlines data bid and…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E32 · 30 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 15 min
No Co-Founder, a Year in Stealth and $20M to Replace Slack | Sara Du, Ando
Sara Du co-founded Alloy Automation at 19 and ran it for five and a half years. Her second company, Ando, she's building solo: team messaging designed from scratch for humans and AI agents working together, freshly out of stealth with a $20M seed from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence Capital. A conversation about why agents are locked out of the tools teams live in, and what founding looks like the second time — alone, on purpose. Topics covered: - Why Slack's architecture can't serve AI agents (the locked office building) - Agents as coworkers: identity, permissions, etiquette, and the…
E31 · 24 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
1M Users in 3 Months, Pivoted, Then Tripled User Count | James Clift, Durable
James Clift hasn't been employed by a company he didn't own since he was sixteen. He paid for a year of university with a window-cleaning business, bought VisualCV as a $100K legacy resume site and rebuilt it (sold 2020), then went solo at South Park Commons and founded Durable, where about 3.5 million people have signed up to start or run a business, more than half of them brand new, on a six-engineer team backed by a $14M Series A led by Spark Capital. Julian and James get into the mission ("make owning a business easier than having a job"), the co-founder math that never works, why a…
E30 · 16 Sep 2026 · 58 min
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 believing "solo" means alone. Topics covered: - The Alchemist, and why starting is freedom from suffering - "YouTube can be your co-founder. ChatGPT can be your co-founder." - The producer, not the investor:…
E29 · 9 Sep 2026 · 48 min
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 features. A robot company deciding whether the body or the brain comes first. The answers keep landing in the same place: they were building what they wanted to sell, not what the customer would say yes to. Topics…
E28 · 2 Sep 2026 · 22 min
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 syndrome." Topics covered: - Solo founder vs co-founder: raise the bar; don't settle for a co-founder of convenience - Why ~65% of startup failures trace to the founding team, and what that means if you're solo -…
E27 · 26 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
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 test: how to know when to stop, and how to wind down well - Restarting from your strengths: $3M raised in three days from the buyers who'd said no - Customer-led pivots: engines to hydraulics to AI…
E26 · 19 Aug 2026 · 36 min
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 actually gets you. Plus the stories they lived before going solo — including co-founding with your dad at 17. Topics covered: The prerequisite trap: why searching for a co-founder gets you a bad one Co-founder…
E25 · 12 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
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. Topics covered: The "right to win" filter: which ideas deserve your resignation letter The enterprise sales playbook from the buyer's side: champions, the $95K threshold tactic, budget cycles Surviving two…
E24 · 5 Aug 2026 · 30 min
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 demo — Railcode's first on camera — and explains why most software going forward will be internal. Topics covered: The "AI-forward" illusion: giving out Claude Code isn't a strategy The one-question test: are…
E23 · 29 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 22 min
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 engineer (the middle-manager trap) The era of the 40-year-old founder: intuition and craftsmanship as leverage What Impeccable is and why AI design slop is a moving target Free-first distribution: no ads, no…
E22 · 22 Jul 2026 · 21 min
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, Julius AI) - The original-insight test: "if you don't have one, don't start" (Sunil Rajaraman, Hamlet) - The "wrong" business model behind a 16-to-429 hockey stick (Jimmy Douglas, Plug) - The $40,000 filter…
E20 · 15 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
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 runs nine scoped agents instead of one, and the honest case for and against going completely solo. Topics covered: The one-person company: running a real business with a team of AI agents "Agents are just…
E19 · 8 Jul 2026 · 37 min
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: The Solo Grants launch: $100 to $1,000, no equity, no payback, and it doesn't have to be a business Microgrants 101: 1517's $1,000 checks, Emergent Ventures, and the Thiel Fellowship lineage The grantee who…
E18 · 1 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
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 honest case for going solo. Topics covered: Why taste is a measurable bar for quality, not just personal preference The real cause of "AI slop" — volume, not bad models How to turn a subjective domain into…
E17 · 24 Jun 2026 · 46 min
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 Knowing when to kill a company and how deep to cut Why momentum, not rest, is the cure for burnout Prospecting for gold vs. operating the mine: where a founder should spend their time The solo founder's…
E16 · 17 Jun 2026 · 59 min
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 still thinks the one-person billion-dollar company is a myth. Topics covered: - Building Sonder from a college side-hustle into a billion-dollar company, and its collapse - Why he went solo for the comeback when…
E15 · 11 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
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 about why the fundraise is a result, not the goal. Topics covered: Why the raise is a result, not the goal — and saying no to VCs for nine months Building your "art" in public until it becomes a company…
E14 · 3 Jun 2026 · 21 min
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+ users), Daniel Francis (Abel), and investor Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures) — on why they built alone, and what they all figured out about it. The through-line: don't take a co-founder of convenience. A…
E13 · 27 May 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
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 case for going it alone. Topics covered: Why co-founders aren't a blood bond — and "are you the one who holds it forever?" The founder "mental disorder," and why you only need one person who has it The bear…
E12 · 20 May 2026 · 57 min
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 solo founding stated as a fact about her own life rather than a thesis. Topics covered: The Korean-immigrant origin and the 2022 side quest that became Lighthouse Services-as-software: why "professional…
E11 · 13 May 2026 · 52 min
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 startups Refounding with $40K and a single investor email The lived playbook for co-founder breakups (lawyer advice, severance + stock + move on) The four-question $40K filter for picking ideas you can ship…
E10 · 6 May 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
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 spent two years protecting a marketplace orthodoxy that was capping growth, until an investor in a fake board meeting asked the question that broke the company open. The chart bent that quarter. This is the…
E9 · 29 Apr 2026 · 55 min
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 newsletter became Hamlet — the civic AI making local government meetings legible to residents, real estate developers, and the cities themselves. This episode is the most concrete civic-engagement segment we've…
E8 · 22 Apr 2026 · 50 min
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 the full thesis behind Solo Founders. They cover the "denominator delusion" that keeps the co-founder default alive, the three types of solo founders (True Solo, Free Solo, Juiced Solo), why companies run…
E7 · 15 Apr 2026 · 51 min
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 practices, and why he insists on being the worst coder on his own team. Topics covered: The co-founder trap — why 8 out of 10 co-founder teams are fighting in private Solo founding by accident — second startup,…
E6 · 8 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 15 min
$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 breaks down the counterintuitive playbook behind his success — from the "benevolent dictatorship" of solo founding to why margins don't matter early on. Topics covered: - Spotting the RAG opportunity before…
E5 · 1 Apr 2026 · 56 min
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 believes solo founders have a massive authorship advantage, and his unfiltered take on co-founders, culture, and the emotional reality of building alone. Topics covered: The domestic violence experience that led…
E4 · 25 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
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 long-term damage, and what it actually takes to keep going when things get brutally hard. This is a conversation about conviction, authorship, loneliness, team-building, and the emotional reality of leading…
E3 · 18 Mar 2026 · 44 min
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 should never give away 40% of your company just to make fundraising easier. Topics covered: - The co-founder breakup rate: 25-30% before Series A - Dead equity and cap table damage from co-founder departures…

About Solo Founders

Solo Founders is a English business podcast from Solo Founders. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Solo Founders
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 58 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1881721449

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