Can AI make a unicorn of a person? Sam Altman thinks so — and Silicon Valley sees technology ‘waiting for us’.

The idea even got the seal of approval from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Speaking during a The interview Along with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Altman said they often speculate about when the primary founder will reach a billion-dollar valuation without even hiring a single worker.

“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year that one person has a billion-dollar company,” Altman told Ohanian. “Which would have been unthinkable without AI and now will be.”

Ohanian was also excited in regards to the prospect. “It’s a radical idea,” he told Altman during an interview at a September conference.

A one-person unicorn would defy the standard wisdom that a company needs to rent more employees to grow. “There’s going to be a new trend where CEOs and founders are going to be very excited to get up and work with very small, very high-performing, very culturally strong teams,” Ohanian said.

For many, it’s a query of when, not if, it would occur. “I don’t know many people who don’t believe that,” says James Currier, a partner at enterprise capital firm NFX.

This latest idea comes at a time when tech unicorns are facing a reckoning. Many have grown sick, and these “Unicorps” have left founders, employees and investors reeling. Former startup employees find themselves unemployed, while investors flock.

Against this backdrop, a one-person unicorn will likely represent the top of the tech industry’s entrepreneurial spirit. A one-man operation using technology to construct a billion-dollar-plus company The founding myth On which Silicon Valley was built, or Sure it was. Since the Nineteen Thirties, when Stanford created its first products with David Packard and Bill Hewlett At the famous HP Garagewhich one Garages became folklore.; for the infamous rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on the dawn of the private computing era; Like Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who calculated the algorithms that ruled the Internet age, the tech industry has all the time idealized the vision of visionary founders who shaped society through willpower. Take giant leaps of technology.

The idea of ​​AI enabling a person’s unicorn is the logical evolution of this trend—and it’s picked up steam throughout Silicon Valley. “We’re entering a new golden age of startups,” says Alex Gurevich, managing director of Javelin Venture Partners.

‘Technology is waiting for us’

Startups, which have long had a fame for resourcefulness, will only see this trait enhanced by AI, which may automate many processes that up to now required large numbers of people. “A startup’s inherent advantage over any incumbent is the ability to move quickly, experiment quickly, make data-driven decision-making, and find ways to fit the product-market,” Gurevich says. but has the power to check through different hypotheses.” “GenAI puts these inherent benefits on steroids.”

Carrier says the tools are already available, they’re just waiting for the precise founder. “Right now, the technology is waiting for us,” says Carrier. “So the technology doesn’t need to be better, we just need to know how to use it.”

There are already a variety of AI startups that specialise in constructing tools for specific business functions, from marketing to legal work. Written code. All of this permits a startup to iterate on 1000’s of different product ideas, marketing taglines, and cost scenarios with a fraction of the time and staff, in response to Gurich. One in July Blog postEntitled “The 3-Person Unicorn Startup,” Currier compares an AI-powered startup to a plate-spinning act where the performer only must spin the plates once to maintain their balance. A push needs to be given every once in a while. The fingers

Dan Sotera, cofounder and chief product officer of web site design startup Muse, says the top of a unicorn is more likely to be a salesperson — the part of running a business that also requires human contact. Is. He warns that some one-person unicorns may get that title on a technical basis, hiring contractors who aren’t considered employees to do design and coding work that neither they nor AI can do. are “I’d put a star next to someone who’s reached the point of being a unicorn of a man like that, though it’s still pretty impressive,” Sotera says. “There’s going to be someone who’s a true one-man shop that hits the identical threshold. To me, that guy or gal gets the prize.

But simply because AI can do a certain task does not imply founders will necessarily let AI do it. Most founders won’t hand over critical tasks to AI where the chance of making a mistake might be particularly severe, in response to NYU professor Vasant Dhar, who researches trust in AI systems. Dhar gives the instance of analyzing a long legal document similar to a contract with a large client or a deal sheet from an investor. In these high-stakes cases, one mistake can spell disaster for a startup.

“The question is, will AI be more efficient and less risky?” he asks.

AI-powered software will eat the world.

There’s a history of very small startups getting massive valuations. Instagram was just popular. 13 employees When it was sold to Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. In 2008, dating website Plenty of Fish had only one worker, founder Marcus Friend, when it was created. $10 million in profits— a rarity for a growth startup — although Frind also had about 75 employees as of 2015 when it Sold a lot of fish for online dating juggernaut Match Group for $575 million.

Besides their limited staff, these firms have something else in common: they’re consumer software. Gorich and Currier say startups creating these types of products are more likely to be the primary one-person unicorns. A software product might be built once—perhaps with the assistance of an AI copilot—and then updated at regular intervals, as in Currier’s spinning-plate analogy. After this is completed, most of the remaining work will probably be recruiting latest users.

Traditional firms, especially people who make physical goods, do not have this luxury. “If you’re Ford Motor Company, you have eight different buildings for eight different functions: procurement, manufacturing, sales, dealerships, marketing,” says Currier. “with them [software] products, you do not. You eliminate many of these parts of your organization, so you do not need people to run them. Then the AI ​​will come to you and enable you with all of the pieces that you must do.

Enterprise software products, while similar, require a more hands-on approach, making them less amenable to the automation required to change into a one-person unicorn. Companies buying software will likely expect regular customer support and higher cybersecurity demands, in response to Gorich.

Another strong candidate to change into the primary one-person unicorn is a direct-to-consumer e-commerce startup, Gurevich says. Such a startup would use AI for idea generation, promoting and market research, he added.

Ironically, a person’s unicorn is unlikely to be an AI company itself. “This one-person unicorn isn’t necessarily going to be building a native GenAI product themselves, but they’re going to be world-class to internally turbocharge GenAI so that the startup can leverage,” says Gurevich.

Founders still must have vision.

But simply because what was once a pipe dream now seems possible, or not less than plausible, does not imply these startups of the longer term won’t still need extraordinary founders. Most unicorns do. Carrier believes that the three-person unicorn will probably be led by a founder who has the identical visionary ideas as most. Successful founders.

“Three-person unicorn founders will need to be paralyzed, and not be afraid to act on those emotions,” he said in his blog post. “You need to be able to see something others don’t, and be aggressive, courageous, or dissenting enough to take action.”

The other two members will probably be a “number person” and a “word person”. They will even should be extremely talented. “It would take a very special talent among all three people to pull off a three-person unicorn,” Carrier wrote. “Some teams will have the multifaceted skills to pull it off.”

According to Sotera, former vice chairman of product at Unicorn Exit, the three core elements of a startup are design, sales and engineering. In the past, having co-founders who specialized in each field was the “holy trinity.” But now, a founder can have all three skill sets that will probably be “enhanced by AI superpowers,” Sotera says.

One thing that may proceed to be a hot commodity is soft skills. Sotera says an AI program cannot close a sale with a large client or doesn’t have enough taste to decide on the precise design for a product.

Currier agrees. “For the information task we’re concerned with, the defensiveness of hard skills tends to decrease over time,” Carrier says.

That’s one other big reason Carrier is sticking with the concept of ​​a three-person unicorn with AI-supercharged productivity fairly than a one-person version. It’s all the way down to human nature, he says—people need company. “If you just do it by yourself, you’re going to be really lonely,” he says. “You don’t enjoy what you’re doing, and you make bad decisions.”