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.

Solo Founders is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Solo Founders, a business show with 0 episodes published.

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  Episode #32

  No Co-Founder, a Year in Stealth and $20M to Replace Slack | Sara Du, Ando

  Sep 30, 20261h 15m

  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 first 90 days - Market-personality fit: picking a problem worth ten years of your life - The solo founder's hiring playbook: attract don't chase, contract-to-hire, minimalist headcount - Co-founder the first time, solo the second: the bear and bull case Guest: Sara Du — founder & CEO of Ando; previously co-founder & CEO of Alloy Automation; Thiel Fellow.

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  Episode #31

  1M Users in 3 Months, Pivoted, Then Tripled User Count | James Clift, Durable

  Sep 23, 20261h 16m

  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 viral AI website builder that hit a million users in three months was a distraction, what door-to-door sales teaches you about fundraising, and why everyone should make a dollar on their own at least once. Links: Subscribe on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@solofounding?sub_confirmation=1 Newsletter: https://solofounders.beehiiv.com/ X: https://x.com/solofounders Apply to the Solo Founders program: https://solofounders.com/program

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  Episode #30

  Why You Don't Need a Co-Founder to Start | Dave Morin, Offline Ventures

  Sep 16, 202658 min

  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: why startups die on relationships - What Jony Ive told Dave when Steve Jobs died - The first twelve hours with Clawdbot, and finding Peter Steinberger - How Polsia actually started: Gift Shop, Kyoto, Company OS, and "Am I crazy?" - Ramble, and the 10,000-dinners test for what to build - The bear case and the bull case for solo founding Guest: Dave Morin — co-founder of Offline Ventures (offline.vc); early Facebook, founder of Path, co-founder of Slow Ventures, Chairperson of the OpenClaw Foundation.

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  Episode #29

  5 Solo Founders Called In With Their Hardest Problem | Solo Founders Office Hours

  Sep 9, 202648 min

  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 covered: Monetizing an open-source app without losing user trust: charge for core value, not perks Services as software: why "I want to sell a product" can be the mistake Calendar spearing, and compressing every step between "I have this problem" and "yes" Going solo: customers as the orienting force, building as the addictive default (add "after a co-founder split" only with Ryan's OK) "Don't be the best, be the only" — whether buyers take a one-person company seriously Feature requests are jobs to be done: the micro-app middle path Hardware vs. software scope: ship the mind before the body Founders: Utkarsh Dalal (GameNative), Ryan Junejo (Crash Labs), Charlie Kahn (Brio), Andy (Phenomni). Host: Julian Weisser.

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  Episode #28

  Why Investors Say "We Don't Back Solo Founders" (And What They Mean)

  Sep 2, 202622 min

  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 - Loneliness as the solo founder's real failure mode, and "solo, together" as the fix - Famous solo founders past and present: eBay, Dell, Zoom, Browserbase, WorkOS, Loyal, Polsia - Fundraising alone: the pass as an easy out; investors reading your talent bar through your hires - The dilution advantage: optimizing for investor quality over valuation - The denominator delusion: the base-rate error behind "solo founders fail more" - "Solo founder syndrome," debunked Host: Julian Weisser, founder of Solo Founders; previously co-founded On Deck (ODF), where he ran the largest co-founder-matching program in tech for seven years. The State of Solo Founding report: https://solofounders.com/report 65% figure: Noam Wasserman, The Founder's Dilemmas (Harvard Business School)

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