“Default co-founders happen when you don't want to do the hard thing.”
David J. Phillips is the solo founder and CEO of Fondo, the bookkeeping and tax platform for startups. Before Fondo worked, he had four co-founder breakups: a college tutoring marketplace, a hackathon co-founder who fired him six months after their seed round, a coding bootcamp co-founder who left, and two co-founders he brought on at YC because going solo made him anxious.
That last one nearly killed the company. Two years in, $1M raised, and no product-market fit. David ran a process to sell the team, but the deal died. He had $40K left in the bank. He wrote the investor update no founder wants to write (the deal is off, the co-founders are leaving, I'm pivoting to something called Fondo) and hit send.
Listen now on the Solo Founders Podcast:
Customers understand before investors do.
“Customers understand before investors do, and often most investors will never understand.”
Julian just updated his 2023 essay. The thesis: most founders should ship to customers before they pitch investors. Customer traction translates into fundraising momentum.
When Adeel Khan started MagicSchool, he had just about everything going against him on the fundraising side: solo, nontechnical, and building in EdTech, perhaps the most hated investment sector. Instead of trying to talk investors out of those concerns, he shipped a prototype. 100 teachers used it the first week. 1,000 the next. The fundraise came after.
The essay also gets into why customers make for good angels and Sam Lessin's (GP at Slow Ventures) argument that any seed deal with more than three or four bids on it is probably a bad one.
A solo founder raised $250M to extend your dog's life.
“Was somebody going to give a 24-year-old a billion dollars to do a shot on goal for longevity? No.”
Celine Halioua is the solo founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech startup developing a life-extension drug for dogs. The NYT just profiled her: more than 1,300 dogs are on a daily, beef-ramen-flavored pill, and Loyal has raised over $250M since 2019. If the drug clears the FDA, it would be the first approved longevity drug for any species.
The reason she went dogs first wasn't really about dogs. A human longevity trial started in 40-year-olds takes 40-plus years to read out. That works for an investor who wants to live in the future, not one who wants to make money now. So at 24, instead of asking for a billion dollars to chase human longevity, she asked for a few million to make traction in dog longevity, with a “dogs first” pitch that built a real near-term market on the way to the human one. In her words: “That's a much easier story to tell.”
Solo, together.
Kieran
