Three must-read stories: Elad Gil's argument against needing a co-founder, how to recruit the best people for your startup, and two years of ABCDLFG. Plus, a new podcast episode is dropping tomorrow. Let's get into it!
The conventional wisdom is wrong.
“You always need a co-founder. I think that's always wrong, or mostly wrong.”
Elad Gil is one of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley. He's a solo GP targeting a $3B raise and an investor in SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Anduril.
In a recent fireside chat, he challenged the startup myth that you always need a co-founder. His argument: Look at the biggest market caps. Michael Dell, no co-founder. Jeff Bezos, no co-founder. Larry Ellison, no co-founder. Bill Gates became a solo founder when Paul Allen left. Steve Jobs was the dominant founder from the start. “Over and over, it was either unequal or solo for many of the biggest things.”
If you're reading this newsletter, you already know this. But it's important that investors like Elad are saying it publicly. The conventional wisdom is shifting, and you're driving it.
More equity for early hires is a massive hiring advantage. Use it.
“The quality of the person you can bring in with more equity is so much higher.”
The founding engineer math is broken. Connor Ling (Investor at Neo) laid it out: compared to joining a frontier lab or starting your own company, getting 1% to work for someone else is a tough sell.
Rex Salisbury (Founder/GP at Cambrian Capital) points to a fix that solo founders are uniquely positioned to offer: When you start with ~100% of the company instead of ~50%, giving a few points to early employees is easier.
The Solo Founders Report shows most solo founders' equity grants still mirror multi-founder companies, following frameworks built for teams that already split the cap table two or three ways. The most successful solo founders we've spoken with aren't doing that. They're using the extra equity to attract talent, and it's working.
Two Years of “ABCDLFG.”
“20K stars on a 2-year project is a big deal! Keep shipping ABCDLFG.”
Two years ago, Dhravya Shah (SFP S25) open-sourced Supermemory from a dorm room. What began as a hackathon project just hit 20K GitHub stars, and he’s now closing $100K+ annual contracts.
The results speak for themselves, but the inputs are worth studying. Same-minute customer email replies, constant launches, etc. During SFP, he coined “ABCDLFG: Always Be Closing Deals, Let’s Fucking Go.” To give you an idea of what that looks like in practice: When a customer wanted to integrate Supermemory, Dhravya invited them to stay overnight so they could ship it by morning.
That energy is a big part of why SFP exists. Julian shared:
“Meeting Dhravya convinced me solo founding was inevitable. It reinforced that solo founders still need peers to build with and confide in. He was the first person I told about SFP, and I took his reaction as a signal it would resonate with other great builders.”
Congrats, Dhravya!
“I realized I was giving away 50% of my equity to someone I couldn't fire, just to argue with them.”
We sat down with a solo founder who dropped out of high school, pretended to be a laid-off Twitter employee to get hired by Elon Musk (and then got fired by him), built a fitness app to $30K MRR and walked away from it, then went on ride-alongs with police departments to build software that saves lives.
Tomorrow on the Solo Founders Podcast (YouTube/Spotify/Apple Podcasts).
Thanks for reading! Also check this out:
Solo, together.
— Kieran, Julian, & The Solo Founders Team
