The Future Is Solo: AI Is Creating Billion-Dollar One-Person Companies – Forbes
Nostalgia is the best word to describe Emily’s feelings as she sits beside her colleagues at a conference table in a sleek high-rise building.
“Remember when we had bosses?” John chuckles.
“Remember when we had office politics?” Olivia asks.
“Remember when we had all that stress?” Saar adds.
“Feels like another lifetime,” Emily says. “Now, our biggest headache is running our own companies better than our competitors. Our solo companies.”
Years ago, Emily and her colleagues would gather at the water cooler—not to discuss business growth, but to vent about their bosses and workplace frustrations. Commiserating this way is natural. People lacking power often draw strength from comparing notes about their daily hassles. NBC’s The Office humorously depicted this reality. So did Workaholics and the film Office Space.
But that’s so pre-2025.
As we straddle the 2030s, technological tools can now produce viable companies of one. Goodbye, W2 employee drudgery. Hello, entrepreneurship.
This is the promise of tech visionary Tim Cortinovis’ new book: Single-Handed Unicorn: How to Solo Build a Billion-Dollar Company. As he told me in our recent interview: “You don’t need a full-time staff anymore—just the right problem to solve and the right mix of AI tools and freelancers.”
Sam Altman agrees with this notion. In this interview, OpenAI’s CEO said, “We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon…in my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it]
