Live data from Hacker News

Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

marcrand.com

41–50 of 158 posts

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#41

One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time. It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines. That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort…

[deleted]

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#43
post #20

I would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.

Oculus

A single founder and a one-person company aren't the same thing. Oculus had about 100 employees when they were acquired; they had about 10 at the time of their Kickstarter campaign.

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#44

One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time. It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines. That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort…

Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.

Wasn’t 100% of the code directly written by Notch until 1-year before acquisition?

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#45
post #35

To put it in perspective based on recent Meta hiring, we're 1/4 of the way to an individual having a $1B valuation let alone a company.

yep, one-person billion dollar company is less than 10x of per-employee valuation of NVDA, OpenAI, PLTR, etc. - a bunch of companies where per-employee valuation has crossed $100M. That is tens of thousands of people, not just one individual.

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#47

One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time. It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines. That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort…

> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.

To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.

Well actually....

No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porsér and soon after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.

No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.

Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company

#50

One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time. It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines. That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort…

Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.

Chris Sawyer has entered the chat[1]

[1] Conveniently ignoring the contributions to graphics and music of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble, but still...

Post reply on HN