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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

#131

Post by paxys »

pradn wrote: post #125
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.…

I'm sure we're already there with musicians as well. If you take Taylor Swift's annual revenue and multiply it by 5-10, you'll easily cross a billion. But she does require tons of staff for the stadium shows that provide the bulk of the revenue, etc. Not literally one person, but it's a company with a bus factor of one.

And I'm willing to bet all that staff is contracted. Her personal employees (people she pays a regular fixed salary to) is probably in the single digits, or possibly even 0.

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

#133

Post by bspammer »

bspammer wrote: post #76
dandellion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought the alpha for 10 euro when it was just one dude posting on a forum and I can tell you it was very much already Minecraft and going viral.

I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.

Found this thread from around that time, it's fun to read now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289

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

#134

Post by jldugger »

bluGill wrote: post #127
jldugger wrote: post #15

> a revenue multiple of 2-4x typical for newsletters values her business at ~$50 million. And this is kind of the problem: how do you value a company held by a single person? There's no open market for shares in this company. And worse, I feel like there's a proof of non-existence: Either: 1. The business is so simple any idiot with a billion dollars can buy and run it. I'm sure such businesses exist but not at the b…

Most likely the person and the business are the same. It is possible (unlikely but work with me...) people might buy subscriptions to 'blugill's insights' but I am the brand you can buy the business from me but if I don't continue to write the content everyone will go elsewhere. As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it. similear for my novel, you would probably worry if I let…

> As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it

Okay, but you need to apply some kind of time discounting for future earnings. And then you're still left with the thorny question of whether the company is worth anything without some kind of perpetual employment contract. Hence the very low multiplier of 2-3x for newsletters.

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

#135

Post by iroddis »

tikhonj wrote: post #102
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.

The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-disk columnar database. I don’t know if it counts as being commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to learn the language is still quite high.

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

#136

Post by jader201 »

xeromal wrote: post #122
jader201 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're talking about is entertainers. Athletes that make that kind of money are entertaining crowds. So the same could be said for famous actors, musicians, etc. But athletes that aren't also entertainers don't make that kind of money.

I'd posit Messi isn't an entertainer unless you consider him playing soccer entertaining by using his athleticism as an athelete.

If an athlete’s money comes primarily from their fame and/or ticket sales from spectators, to me that’s the definition of an entertainer.

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

#137

Post by CafeRacer »

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.

I mean... you can just copy/paste BTC or ETH software, name it differently... or get ERC721 and name it something.

Software itself will not make people use it.

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

#138

Post by CafeRacer »

crazygringo wrote: post #101
mlhpdx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, so you're saying that there were not a single 1B+ valuation company out there that failed?

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

#139

Post by AndreLock »

Using valuation as a measuring stick is a bit silly given how much valuations can be inflated based on a pre-revenue idea and the pedigree of the company founder(s). When Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and walked into a room of investors saying, "I'm starting my own AI company", they arguably both created one-person, billion dollar companies right then and there.

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

#140

Post by norir »

AndreLock wrote: post #139

Using valuation as a measuring stick is a bit silly given how much valuations can be inflated based on a pre-revenue idea and the pedigree of the company founder(s). When Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and walked into a room of investors saying, "I'm starting my own AI company", they arguably both created one-person, billion dollar companies right then and there.

You can argue it, but I disagree. Whatever their skills and experience, they did nothing alone.
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