81–90 of 158 posts
If we broaden the scope like that, there are many one-person companies doing even more in gaming. Schedule I sold for $100 million in less than six months.
To see for yourself how this might be done in principle, ask your favorite LLM to 1. Comprehensively describe the standard operating procedures for a selected corporate role, and to create a comprehensive plan for writing computer code to implement those SOPs.
Here is a link to a ChatGPT 5 query about the role of Chief Customer Success Officer: https://chatgpt.com/share/689b9c31-bb20-8006-89fb-0ad082a52a...
But not willing to grow over a 10 person team may be a strong and feasible personal preference.
My bet is on $10 billion with a team of 10 people.
Does that still count?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed? It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft". I'm thinking about https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-Classic as the Ur-Minecraft. Edit: Added the missing words
> at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft". When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copi…
Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.
Pretty sure he is spot on. B2B is where most venture money goes right now, but this mythical 1-person unicorn certainly won't come from this space and will likely be missed by classic venture capitalists like YC.
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.
It never made much sense to me. If one person can make a billion dollar company, it likely means that the product itself isn't too complex or big - unless said person has been stealth developing a product for years. But in this case, let us assume it is something founded recently, and aided with AI because, well...AI. That's the pitch right? So what moat could such a company have? If you can be one man building a bil…
> I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"
Yep, and it gives me Ponzi vibes.
Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.
Joe Rogan could fire all his staff and there would still be companies lining up around the block to buy his podcast for $1B+.
There are many such examples of a person having something or being something that is worth a lot to someone else, to the tune of billions.
So by that metric a one-person billion dollar company has already been achieved. What remains are the technicalities (does it need to be incorporated, does it need to have revenue, does it need to operate as a traditional business).
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Couldn't ever do it alone without having someone (that loves him) sacrificing so much for him. >Yes this counts as "alone" I don't even know what to say to that, I guess we're just straight up redefining words to make yourself feel good?
I am curious which of the following (if any) you would define as alone: 1) one person but they take VC funding 2) one person but they use open source solutions 3) one person but they live with their parents 4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.
5) One person with a copper mine and a soldering gun.