“It's not the blood bond it was made out to be.”
Michael Grinich is the solo founder and CEO of WorkOS, the API platform that makes SaaS apps enterprise-ready, with customers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor. It's year eight. When he started, he was open to a co-founder. He just thinks the question most founders ask themselves is the wrong one.
Michael says, “Look at the famous multi-founder companies.” Facebook had five co-founders. The most common outcome for a company with multiple co-founders is that years in, one person is still running it. So the real question isn't co-founders or not. It's: Are you that person? The one who internalizes this as their life's work. Once you accept that frame, everything downstream changes: how you build, who you hire, what you commit to. And if there's more than one person in the room with that obsession, it's almost worse. There's only room for one CEO at Meta.
Listen now on the Solo Founders Podcast:
Solo, together.
Kieran
