There’s a strange new shape in the startup ecosystem. Not a triangle of co-founders. Not a pyramid of hierarchy. Just a dot. A single founder. No team, no office, no standups, no Slack arguments over which emoji to use for “important.”
Welcome to the age of the solopreneur.
In 2025, venture capitalists-those supposedly allergic to anything that doesn’t scale like a sneeze in a server farm-are throwing cash at individuals building entire companies solo. This isn’t a fluke. It’s a recalibration.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree,” Abraham Lincoln once said, “and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Of course, Abe didn’t have access to Notion templates, GPT-5, and Webflow. If he had, he might’ve launched a DTC axe brand with zero employees and a killer launch video narrated by an AI-generated Sam Elliott.
Why Now?
The shift didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past decade, we’ve watched the cost of building products fall like the moral standards of crypto influencers. Cloud computing, no-code platforms, AI copilots-tools that used to be locked in the hands of dev teams are now in a single founder’s browser tabs.
| Old Startup Stack | Solopreneur Stack |
| Founders (2-3) | One clever human |
| Developers | ChatGPT & Replit |
| Designers | Figma templates |
| Marketers | Twitter threads & Zapier |
| Sales team | Stripe link |
Add in pandemic-era remote culture, rising burnout, and a newfound love for async everything, and you’ve got fertile ground for a new class of founders: builders, creators, coders, and even newsletter operators who realized they didn’t need a team to build something valuable.
A VC’s New Bet
VCs aren’t blind romantics. They’re not investing in solopreneurs because it’s trendy-they’re doing it because it’s lean, fast, and anti-bloat. One person can build an MVP in a weekend, validate it on Reddit, launch on Product Hunt, and get their first 100 paying customers before a traditional startup has finished arguing over its logo.
Even fundraising itself is changing. Tools like AngelList Roll Up Vehicles, equity crowdfunding, and AI-generated pitch decks mean a founder can bypass gatekeepers. Some solopreneurs raise micro-rounds in Discord channels faster than you can say “SAFE note.”
Tips for Solopreneurs (and Wannabes)
- Don’t wait for a co-founder. You are the co-founder.
- Automate early, outsource wisely. Know the difference between a one-time task and a recurring headache.
- Ship ugly. Perfectionism is just fear wearing a clean shirt.
- Market as you build. The story is the product sometimes.
Is This Sustainable?
Maybe. Maybe not. A one-person startup has its limits. There’s no one to check your decisions, no one to carry the load when burnout creeps in. Some VCs quietly whisper about “founder fragility”-the risk that one person gets sick, bored, or distracted by a better idea.
Still, the bet is that a small percentage of these solopreneurs will scale into something massive, at which point they’ll hire or merge or pivot into something more traditional.
Open-Ended Question
If one person can build a business that generates millions in ARR… should we still call it a startup? Or is the term outdated, like calling a YouTuber a “video producer”?