111–120 of 158 posts
I say this as someone who spend the last decade building a business with zero employees. I’m nowhere near a billion: by design & the patent absurdity of that “goal”.
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.
This seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there. https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_any...
This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
I think the biggest risk in having an actual one-person billion dollar company is the Bus Factor [0] Billion dollar valuation depends on investors, investors will never pay that valuation due the inherent risk in a one-person company. They’ll force them to hire for redundancy. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
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 Technically. The reality is much closer to "Any piece of valuable software will get a crappy free version after some amount of time, and multiple paid copies"
But maybe other things matter more to you, that is possible of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah this is some insanely out of touch nonsense.. I have no idea who she is but the idea that any of the current crop of models could replace a copy editor is laughable. Just ask it how many times the letter b appears in blueberry.
The models can replace humans. They can't do it well, but it might be good enough. If you are tiny and just barely making money at all in your job you should evaluate if this cost cutting is good enough or not. i'm getting the idea though the whoever she is - she is making good amount of money: she should demand a higher bar that I don't think llm's can meet today just because she can afford it and the risk that it m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there. https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/18mcpme/does_any...
Yes, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that the value was created by one person. He didn’t HAVE to hire those people and it still would have eventually made a billion dollars. This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.