[The View] The Era When One Person Can Become an Entire Company

$1 Million in Revenue by a Solo Founder
The Rise of the "One-Person Startup" Era Powered by AI
Easy to Start, but Survival Remains Tough

Last year, an Israeli developer sold an artificial intelligence (AI) no-code tool that he had built alone on his laptop over six months to Wix, a US-based company, for $80 million in cash. The company had only one employee, with no external investment whatsoever. Less than a year after the acquisition, the product’s annual revenue reached about $100 million. According to the traditional logic of Silicon Valley, such a scenario would have been almost impossible.

However, cases like this are no longer exceptions. In the United States, the proportion of one-person startups is growing rapidly. According to a report from one company, nearly half of profitable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products are run by solo founders with no employees. Some people are generating millions of dollars in revenue as one-person companies, whether from their local cafe or their own bedroom.

The core driver of this shift is not simply the advancement of tools. The startup model has long operated under a single assumption: to make more, you need to hire more. Venture capital (VC) funding, at its core, was money to purchase labor in advance. A $10 million Series A round effectively equated to one year’s worth of payroll.

Generative AI is shaking up this equation. Code is written by AI coding tools, design is handled by image generation models, customer service is managed by chatbots, and marketing content is produced by language models. It is now common to see solo founders doing what used to require a team of ten, paying only a few hundred dollars a month for these tools. Even more interesting is that the very nature of labor has become modular. The founder is no longer the person who executes tasks directly but is more of an orchestrator, directing various AI agents.

This transformation is also changing the meaning of capital. If one person can generate $1 million in revenue, there is little need for a $5 million investment. In fact, some solo founders in the US are maintaining annual revenues of several million dollars without any outside investment, choosing not to further scale their companies.

The typical exit strategy is not an initial public offering (IPO) but early mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by big tech companies. This shift is producing another consequence: the democratization of one-person startups is paradoxically leading to a concentration of power among big tech firms. A market is now forming where giant corporations can easily acquire lightweight products that anyone can develop.

Of course, not everyone succeeds. Most solo founders remain at monthly revenues of a few thousand dollars. Only a tiny fraction surpass the $1 million mark. Lowering the barrier to entry is not the same as lowering the barrier to success. In fact, as the entry barrier falls, the distribution of outcomes becomes even steeper. When anyone can try, no one is guaranteed safety.

There are also clear inherent limitations. While AI can replace a significant portion of routine and repetitive work, strategic judgment, human relationships, and brand intuition remain firmly in the human domain. Moreover, having no team means there is no one to bounce ideas off or jointly verify decisions. The costs most frequently cited by solo founders are ultimately isolation and decision fatigue. Not hiring people also means losing the signals that come from human interaction.

Nevertheless, the direction of this change is clear. The startup model of the past 30 years was predicated on the idea that a team is the company. People were the decisive variable, and capital was a means of gathering those people. Now, that premise is being put to the test.

If a company can be defined as a single person surrounded by AI models, API calls, and automated pipelines, we may need to reconsider what the word "corporation" truly means. And when the first one-person unicorn (a privately held startup valued at over KRW 1 trillion) emerges, the greatest shock will not be felt by that tiny company, but by the giant firms beside it that have employed thousands to do the same work.

Professor Yoonseok Son, University of Notre Dame (USA)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.