“As a solo founder, it becomes two layers versus three. You have just the CEO and the founding team, where everyone is an equal owner of the business.”
Eugenia Kuyda is a 2x solo founder. She started as a journalist and later served as editor-in-chief for a well-respected publication in Russia. After losing her best friend, she created one of the first conversational AI products in 2014 to recreate him so she could keep talking to him. That became Replika, which she built for a decade and scaled to 30M users. Now she's building Wabi, a platform for creating, discovering, and remixing mini apps, backed by $20M from a16z and others.
Most co-founded companies have three layers: the CEO, the co-founders, and the founding team. Eugenia argues that solo founders can collapse that. Without a co-founder layer, your first 10 to 15 people sit directly beside you. More equity, more ownership, no one feeling as if they work for a separate group that's superior to them. Her Wabi founding team has seven or eight ex-founders who all feel like owners.
She also talks about giving someone the co-founder title just to get into YC and how it backfired, solo founding while pregnant with a toddler at home, and why she chose to do it again.
Listen now on the Solo Founders Podcast:
Solo, together.
Julian
