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

marcrand.com

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

#101

Post by crazygringo »

mlhpdx wrote: post #31
crazygringo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point. People don't generally spend $1B to prove a point. They'll spend it on a network of users that is genuinely that valuable though. That's what Zuck did in dropping $1B on Insta. And it seems entirely possible that if Insta were built today, it could be done with a single person.

Oh wow, that's simply not true. Many investors have spent more than that to prove a point. Sometimes in one place, sometimes over many places and years.

Ok, who?

Who has invested $1B+ in something they expected would lose money just to "prove a point"? And what was the point?

And Musk buying Twitter doesn't count because he was forced to buy it after it became clear he would lose money. He did everything he could to get out of it.

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

#102

Post by tikhonj »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #18

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…

There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever become household names because they're not driven to grow and build a monopoly at all costs, they're driven to build and sell very specific software to very specific organizations.

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

#103

Post by ttoinou »

mrkramer wrote: post #92
CafeRacer wrote: post #4

I'd predict a one person unicorn company potentionally possible, but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point. Not a company that delivers a great product and can be sustainable in the long run. Purely from the operational perspective, you need to handle support, you need to handle billing, to handle lawsuits, to handle infrastructure, to handle incidents... and st…

Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can probably be made by LLM so if you have a good idea for cryptocurrency or some crypto token and you can vibe code it with LLM, perhaps it can reach a $1bn market cap.

One bug and the value crashes to 0 though

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

notahacker wrote: post #94
trhway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The $1b per employee large corporation is much easier to imagine though, per the point of the OP - it's hard to imagine someone generating so much revenue that their company is valued at $1b not choosing to hire at least one person to do stuff they haven't got time for or don't like doing.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by jlarocco »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #18

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…

> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.

There are still plenty of areas where this isn't true. Or where the free versions are so far behind it may as well be true.

I work on CAD software that integrates with Catia, NX, and Creo, and the pro CAD software is light years ahead of the free alternatives. And even if the free stuff catches up, there's practically zero chance the biggest users will switch from what they're currently using. CAD lock-in is tricky. A lot of times the different CAD systems target different niches, so it's not just file format lock-in, but that a certain CAD system is better for making planes, or designing for CNC, or whatever. And most companies have automation that integrates with their particular CAD system. And the parts have to be read by newer software for decades and produce identical results, or they won't fit together right.

Some of the vendors release free versions, but they're not open source, and they're only there to steer people towards the paid versions later on.

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

#108

Post by jedberg »

paxys wrote: post #88

Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B. 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.…

> Joe Rogan could fire all his staff

I think the premise is that it is only ever one person.

> Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B.

> Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.

And that we're not talking about a personal brand, but a real company with real ongoing revenue.

Basically it's a shortcut for the belief that all those other people that founders hire could be replaced with AI.

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

#109

Post by beklein »

I guess it is not very likely but I would suggest a solo scientists/innovator as the best candidate...

Near future AI systems, novel research methods and unique datasets (and a lot of luck) could let a single researcher make breakthrough advances. I am thinking of a room-temperature superconductor in materials science or a better transformer architecture in computer science, potentially yielding a billion-dollar patent or company, even if that’s beyond today’s AI system's capabilities.

The specific idea here is not important, the leverage of a new scientific advancement could be though.

Not every company needs to be a SaaS with focus on B2B that won't scale sufficiently for investors with one employee...

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

#110

Post by MattRix »

pryelluw wrote: post #30

So, why not then use AI to create all these billion dollar companies for themselves? Why sell access to the model? Will there be a shovel that uncovers a billion dollar gold nugget? Why sell the shovel then?

you still have to find the nugget in the first place
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