Solo Founders
The Solo Founder's Podcast features in-depth interviews with solo founders building remarkable companies. Each week, host Julian Weisser sits down with solo founders who are either operating at serious scale or doing something right now that you need to know about. From Series B and beyond to founders breaking out in real-time, these are the conversations that define what it means to build solo. New episodes every week.
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Your Company Gave Everyone Claude Code. Now What? | Yakko Majuri, Railcode
<p>Companies are handing every employee AI coding tools and calling themselves AI-native — then blocking everything those employees build. Yakko Majuri, early PostHog engineer and infrastructure lead at Doublepoint through its acquisition by Oura, just launched Railcode: a secure home for internal apps and AI agents where you build with your own tools and deploy in seconds. He gives a live demo — Railcode's first on camera — and explains why most software going forward will be internal.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>The "AI-forward" illusion: giving out Claude Code isn't a strategyThe one-question test: are you holding your team back?Why most s...
AI Can Build Your App. It Can't Make It Good. | Paul Bakaus, Impeccable
<p>Paul Bakaus created jQuery UI, sold a startup to Zynga, and spent nearly a decade at Google — then went solo to prove one experienced builder, amplified by AI, can do what used to take a team. His company Renaissance Geek is backed by a16z; its first product, Impeccable, stops AI coding agents from shipping design slop.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>Why his first hire was a chief of staff, not an engineer (the middle-manager trap)The era of the 40-year-old founder: intuition and craftsmanship as leverageWhat Impeccable is and why AI design slop is a moving targetFree-first di...
What It Actually Takes To Build a Startup Solo | 6 VC-Backed Successful Solo Founders
<p>Everyone thinks going solo means answering to no one. Six solo founders behind WorkOS, Fondo, Plug, Lighthouse, Hamlet, and Julius AI say the opposite: you have more bosses, not fewer, and the job is convincing all of them. Julian revisits the six moments that deserved more attention the first time around.</p><p>Topics covered:<br>- Why going solo means more convincing, not less (Rahul Sonwalkar, Julius AI)<br>- The original-insight test: "if you don't have one, don't start" (Sunil Rajaraman, Hamlet)<br>- The "wrong" business model behind a 16-to-429 hockey stick (Jimmy Douglas, Plug)<br>...
She Staffed Her 100k-User Startup With AI Agents | Claire Vo, ChatPRD
<p>Claire Vo runs ChatPRD — an AI "Chief Product Officer" for over 100k product managers — as the only full-time human, bootstrapped, with zero venture capital. The twist: she operates the company with a staff of nine named AI agents she manages like real employees, one of whom emailed the studio before she arrived to coordinate arrival time. She and Julian dig into how she built it, why she runs nine scoped agents instead of one, and the honest case for and against going completely solo.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>The one-person company: running a real business with a team of A...
How To Get $1,000 For Your Project, No Strings Attached | Solo Grants
<p>Today we're launching Solo Grants: $100–$1,000 grants, 100% no strings attached, for people building technically ambitious projects solo. Julian sits down with Ari Dutilh who leads the program and is a former grantee himself, to map the wide world of microgrants and explain why the gap between a project seen through and one abandoned is usually just a few hundred dollars.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>The Solo Grants launch: $100 to $1,000, no equity, no payback, and it doesn't have to be a businessMicrogrants 101: 1517's $1,000 checks, Emergent Ventures, and the Thiel Fellowship lineageThe grantee who asked for $100 less than his application, and th...
She Raised $18M Solo to Kill AI Slop | Thais Castello Branco, Taste Labs
<p>Thais Castello Branco left the AI search company Exa, raised $18.5M, and built Taste Labs -- the "taste layer for AI" -- solo, with one mission: end AI slop. She and Julian go deep on what taste actually is (and why it isn't personalization), why everything AI makes is starting to look the same, how you turn something as subjective as "great design" into data a model can learn, and the honest case for going solo.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>Why taste is a measurable bar for quality, not just personal preferenceThe real cause of "AI slop" — volume, no...
Going Solo Should Be the Rule, Not the Exception | Flo Crivello, Lindy
<p>Flo Crivello raised about $50M as a solo founder, then watched the market kill the company he'd built. Instead of quitting, he cut deep, pivoted, and rebuilt alone into Lindy — one of the top AI agent startups. This is a clear-eyed playbook on knowing when to kill a company, beating burnout with momentum, and building solo without being alone.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>Raising ~$50M as a solo founderKnowing when to kill a company and how deep to cutWhy momentum, not rest, is the cure for burnoutProspecting for gold vs. operating the mine: where a founder should spend th...
His Public Company Blew Up. He Came Back Solo. | Francis Davidson, Odessia
<p>Francis Davidson built Sonder into a multi-billion-dollar company, took it public, was pushed out as CEO, and watched it collapse. The same month he left, he started over — this time solo, building Odessia, an AI travel agent, with a founding team of seven. This is the honest version of the comeback: why he went solo when his co-founders were great, why he skipped the MVP, and why he still thinks the one-person billion-dollar company is a myth.</p><p>Topics covered:<br>- Building Sonder from a college side-hustle into a billion-dollar company, and its collapse<br>- Why he...
Sold a Company at 16, Raised $3M at 19 | Dhravya Shah, Supermemory
<p>Dhravya Shah sold his first company at 16 and raised $3M at 19 as the solo founder of Supermemory, the open-source memory and context layer for AI agents (now past 26k GitHub stars and 1M+ SDK downloads). The twist: he never chased any of it as a business. He built in public, for free, said no to VCs for nine months, and only raised once the company's vision was undeniable. A conversation about why the fundraise is a result, not the goal.</p><p>Topics covered:</p>Why the raise is a result, not the goal — and saying no to VCs fo...
I Asked 5 Massively Successful Founders Why They Went Solo
<p>A $300M company. 30M+ users. Tens of millions in revenue, some raised and some bootstrapped from zero. Software that saves lives. Five founders, zero co-founders.</p><p>Julian connects the dots across the first six episodes of the show — Ben Cera (Polsia, $30M raised), Yasser Elsaid (Chatbase, $10M ARR bootstrapped), Paul Klein IV (Browserbase, a $300M company), Eugenia Kuyda (Replika, 30M+ users), Daniel Francis (Abel), and investor Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures) — on why they built alone, and what they all figured out about it.</p><p>The through-line: don't take a co-founder of convenience. A talented solo founder beats a mi...
