In 2016 I had a storytelling app that was working. It was picked top 10 of about 155 startups to pitch at Harvard Arab Weekend. It went on to a 4.5+ rating across 976 ratings and more than 100,000 downloads, and readers wrote reviews in eleven languages over nine years.
It had eighteen stories in it. Ten years later, it still had eighteen stories in it.
People assume a product like that stops because the demand disappeared, or the founder lost interest, or a bigger company arrived. None of that happened. The real reason is far more ordinary, and I think it has quietly ended thousands of good companies: I knew exactly what to build next, and there was no way for one person to build it.
The idea was right. The year was wrong.
To grow, that product needed a production department, a design department, engineering, translation, marketing and someone to run all of it. That is a company. I could not build a company, so the product waited — well reviewed, frozen, for most of a decade.
For years I thought of that as a money problem. It is something slightly different, and the difference turns out to be the whole story: a company is not a crowd of people. It is a set of departments that all have to be covered — and until now, covering a department meant hiring one.
What covering them has always cost
And covering them that way has a price far beyond salaries.
Twenty people means meetings. Fifty means a disagreement that takes a week to settle and a decision nobody quite owns. Two hundred means somebody does not finish on Thursday and four other people have nothing to do on Friday. Every time work passes between departments, some of the thinking behind it is lost and has to be explained again.
No founder ever chose that. It was simply what a complete company cost, and everyone paid it, because the alternative was leaving half the departments empty.
What is different now
The usual thing said about AI is that it makes you faster. True, and not the interesting part — someone thirty per cent faster changes their week, not what is possible.
What is new is that one person can now hold every department at once. And when one person holds all of them, none of that cost appears. Nothing is handed over, because there is nobody to hand it to. Nothing waits until Friday. Nothing is explained twice, because it never left the same head.
This year I built the company I had described in 2016. Here is what I personally run, and there is no one else:
That is eight departments. In 2016 each of them was a person I could not hire, and together they were the reason the product never grew.
2016
- 1 library
- 18 stories
- 1 language
- Needed roughly forty people
- Never built
2026
- 12 libraries
- More than 100× the stories
- 12 languages
- One person, in months
- 12 Android apps live, 4 on the App Store
And the size is the smaller half of it. The quality of the illustration, the depth of research behind each story, the consistency of a style held across thousands of pages — none of that could have been bought at any price I could have reached in 2016. It was not merely too expensive. It did not exist.
But what if something happens to the founder?
Every investor asks a solo founder this, and they are right to ask. What if you are ill for a month? What if you are hit by a bus?
For as long as there have been solo founders, the honest answer was: everything is in his head, and if the head goes, the company goes. That was never prejudice. It was a fair reading of a real risk, and it is the strongest argument ever made against backing one person.
That answer has changed — and I think it matters more than the speed. The same tools that help build the company also write down how it was built. Recording decisions used to be a chore everyone promised to do later and nobody did. Now it happens while the work happens: every choice captured with the reason behind it, because capturing it costs nothing. Whoever takes over does not inherit a mystery. They inherit a company with its thinking attached.
That is only true of a founder who actually does it. But it is possible now, and it was not possible before — and it quietly answers the oldest question anyone has ever had about one-person companies.
What still needs more than one person
Being honest about the limits
I am not saying teams are finished, and an article that said so would deserve to be ignored. There is a real list of things one person cannot do:
Relationships take time, and time has not changed. Enterprise sales, partnerships, anything built on trust with many people at once still needs a human with hours in the day, and hours are the one thing AI did not add.
There is no backup. A team absorbs an illness or a hard month. One person does not. Writing everything down protects what the company knows; it does not keep the company moving while nobody is at the desk.
There is nobody to disagree with you. All that back-and-forth between departments is slow, but it is sometimes what catches a bad decision before it ships. Remove it and you lose the delay and the safety net together — so a solo founder has to go and find that challenge somewhere else, deliberately.
Some work is physical, regulated, or in another time zone, and nothing puts one person in two places at once.
Why we believe the first billion-dollar solo founder is coming
Not us. I have no idea whether WonderBooks will be big, and claiming otherwise would make the rest of this worth ignoring.
The claim is about the era, and it is simple enough to test. A company worth tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or a billion — built, run and maintained by a single person — is now something that can actually happen. At no earlier moment could it. Covering the departments always meant a payroll, and a payroll always meant everything that comes with organising people. That is no longer the arrangement.
Somebody is going to do it. When they do, it will not be because they were cleverer than the founders of the last twenty years. It will be because they were the first who did not need anyone else.
I am writing this because I ran the experiment by accident. The same founder, the same idea, ten years apart — impossible the first time, finished the second. I was not trying to prove anything about the era. I was trying to finish a library, and what I learned on the way turned out to be bigger than the library.
There are a great many people who had a good idea and no way to build it, and who concluded from the silence that the idea was not good enough. Most of them were wrong, and they are about to find out.