>Heather Cox Richardson ... could easily replace her two copy editors with Claude.
I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
11–20 of 158 posts
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#12Do athletes count?
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#13I 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.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#14I wrote a blog post about this topic recently. My argument is that it has already happened.
https://www.andycarnevale.com/blog/one-person-billion-dollar...
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#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 billion dollar status.
2. Only this one genius can, which means anyone the genius would sell to should use a valuation of 0x.
Seems like a huge problem for anyone needing some fraction of that billion to be liquid!
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#16I can see it happening. You have to utilize a lot of other one person startup services, so ultimately it’s a still a virtual company. But you won’t have to be beholden to anyone other than the customer.
So every individual becomes a company? The natural tendency of capitalism is to create bigger companies for "scale". Even if it was possible, what exactly would be the benefit of one person companies?
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#17I can see it happening. You have to utilize a lot of other one person startup services, so ultimately it’s a still a virtual company. But you won’t have to be beholden to anyone other than the customer.
If it were really pulling in that kind of revenue, surely you would need/want in house accounting/tax.
I'd probably worry less about in-house accounting and legal than I would a lot of other things. Those are probably pretty hirable. Depends on the nature of the business of course. As I noted elsewhere, my more immediate concern would be someone who could handle critical matters if you, your wife, or your child is sick (or god forbid you go on vacation) and there are immediate important matters that need to be dealt with properly.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#18One 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 of proprietary format.
Many companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Google could sustain a dramatically lower headcount if they started from scratch and never went outside the confines of their network monopoly markets.
From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.
In fact a close example already exists -- Minecraft was very close to being a single person unicorn.
If we have a one person unicorn, I'd imagine it'd be something more like Minecraft than someones newsletter or Google!
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#19J. K. Rowling?
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#20I 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