Huma Siraj
Henry Shi is definitely a candidate if there is a scorekeeper in the competition to build a billion-dollar, one-person company. The “Top 10 Lean AI Native Companies Leaderboard” was established in March by Shi, a cofounder and current board member of the money-saving app Super.com, to monitor the development of lean startups vying for a $1 billion valuation in one-person businesses or those with extremely small staff. A friend’s response to the query, “What do investors care most about?” inspired him to create it.
According to his acquaintance, “beating other investors on a leaderboard is the one thing investors care about.”
Although it was a joking remark, 44 companies are now on the scoreboard that Shi made. His requirements for admission are that they must have less than 30 workers, be younger than five years old, show comparatively rapid growth, and generate $5 million in recurring revenue annually.
The leaderboard is a useful tool in Shi’s opinion. “In reality, I want to know how to create much leaner, more efficient businesses.” Shi says.
Located on revenue, Telegram, a messaging startup located in Dubai, is currently at the top of the list. It presently employs thirty team members and makes $1 billion a year. Additionally, it has the highest valuation on the list $1 billion per employee with a $30 billion valuation.
Second is the AI design startup Midjourney, which employs 40 people and generates $500 million in revenue annually. Its valuation per employee is the second highest at $250 million, with a $10 billion valuation.
Shi is part of an increasing number of experts, investors, and entrepreneurs that are closely watching the competition to build billion-dollar companies with ultra-lean or one-person teams. Many founders have been inspired by the leaderboard and are now contacting Shi to ask for their firm to be included.
He says, “I think it’s a challenge, and a lot of founders are driven people, so they want to challenge themselves.” “And now, reaching $1 billion actually might be possible,” he continues, though he is unsure if it will be by a one-person firm or one that employs “10, 15, or 20” people.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of those betting that a solopreneur would make $1 billion. In an interview with Reddit cofounder Alex Ohanian in 2024, he revealed that he and his CEO pals had set up a betting pool to employ AI agents to forecast the first year a solopreneur company will be valued at $1 billion.
As a volunteer for the New York Public Library (NYPL), I’m moderating a free community event panel series about the race to build a billion-dollar, one-person company (Part 2 is accessible to the public today, November 17, 2025, at noon EST).
Since I started writing about billion-dollar, one-person businesses for Forbes in 2013, I’ve been interested in the possibility. In my 2018 book The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, venture capitalist Eric Scott who was then a partner in PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s venture capital fund SciFi VC shared that he and his colleagues had been debating how long it would take for a one-person company to be acquired for $1 billion.
More people are now participating in the discussion. When the trend of million-dollar, one-person businesses started to emerge in large quantities, owners were forced to rely on digital tools and apps in addition to contractors to expand the possibilities of what one person could do. They may now use AI, which is significantly more potent, using technologies like ChatGPT, which was made public in November 2022.
Meanwhile, the number of seven-figure solo businesses has already increased exponentially. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Nonemployer Statistics show that 117,060 partnerships and solopreneurs made $1 million in sales in 2023. For the first time, the number more than quadrupled from 57,222 to 116,803 between 2021 and 2022. In contrast, 31,780 of these companies made more than $1 million in 2012.
Million-dollar, one-person companies are still anomalies, like Olympic athletes in the world of solopreneurs. For comparison, the average revenue of 30,427,808 nonemployer enterprises in the United States is presently $57,611. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is less than the average wage in the country, which is $67,920. Today’s unicorns would be outnumbered in rarity by billion-dollar, one-person companies.
However, the race to build a billion-dollar, one-person company is being closely watched by many powerful individuals due to the rapid growth of high-impact, extremely lean organizations.
Benjamine Liu, CEO and cofounder of Formation Bio, a startup that speeds up the development of new drugs; Kanjun Qiu, CEO and cofounder of Imbue, an AI research lab that assists clients in coordinating AI coding agents; Dan Murphy, Mitchell Green, founder and managing partner of Lead Edge Capital, which backs companies like Alibaba, Asana, and MindBody; Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, a people management platform; and Richard Socher, CEO of You.com, which provides an AI search infrastructure for enterprise teams. Socher, whose clients had developed over 50,000 distinct AI agents on the platform, talked about the possibility of automating most or all of a company.
An Outlook on the Future of Employment
The trend provides an intriguing look at the nature of labor in the future. It might mean more tiny, entrepreneurial businesses with a big impact, but it might also mean leaner organizations with fewer jobs and a lean staff managing both AI and a small crew of people.
Socher stated on the Davos panel, “I think we’re all going to be managers of AI, every individual contributor will be.” “And that’s just one interpretation.
The alternative view is that, of course, one person will actually manage a whole unicorn business using only AI agents. And I believe that will happen a little later. You will require competence. Additionally, I believe that as we all need to upskill our own staff members as well as everyone else in the world, we need to become increasingly adept at identifying and evaluating the outputs of AI, comprehending how it can swiftly confirm that the processes are functioning effectively with the AI rather than producing the original work product myself.
A Different Funding Environment?
If there are several billion-dollar, one-person companies, it may also indicate that entrepreneurs who don’t have access to venture capital or loans, or who decide to bootstrap, will have another way to build scalable enterprises. Having a bank line of credit or investment capital frequently dictates how quickly a business may grow because salaries and benefits are often the largest expenses.
Businesses that use AI agents can expand without needing to hire them, which reduces the amount of outside investment they require. According to Shi, “many of these AI companies can now get to revenue quickly.” “Venture is not really necessary.”
However, it remains to be seen how near we are to the billion-dollar, one-person enterprise. While AI can perform much of the agentic work required to build a billion-dollar, one-person company, Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research who studies independent work and will be on the NYPL panel, notes that AI is still unable to manage the project management required to oversee all of a company’s moving components, including accounting, finance, marketing, and sales.
King says, “I find it difficult to see one person at their desk running the entire thing.” “I can see a billion-dollar one-person business being built with just one or two employees and on-demand freelance assistance.”
King thinks the race to $1 billion might be won by creator companies rather than AI-powered ones, especially if the metric is revenue. He cites well-known businessmen like Golden State Warriors basketball player Steph Curry, whose company,
Thirty Ink, reportedly brought in $174 million in 2024 from sponsorships, lectures, films, and other endeavors. According to King, “many well-known entertainers and influencers are in this situation.” “If you have the leverage of that kind of celebrity following, you can build a very large business.”
Trent Fowler, a data scientist and futurist who will be on the NYPL panel and a consultant with expertise in the nexus of AI and business strategy, thinks it might take some time for firms that heavily rely on AI to reach $1 billion in revenue or valuation.
One reason, according to Fowler, is that the pace at which AI models advance for instance, from ChatGPT 3 to 4 is completely unpredictable. “We’re not really sure how much more juice there is in the squeeze, although I think it’s quite a bit,” he continues.
Beyond this, there are challenges such as the accuracy of AI and security flaws, he says. “Even if a person who’s a top 1% programmer, a top 1% vibe coder, and a business genius can create a business that’s a billion-dollar valuation, or even does a billion dollars in revenue, there’s a question of how long you can actually keep that going,” he says.
Ultimately, we’ll need to see cases of entrepreneurs who have, for instance, vibe coded their platform“ and it actually works,” Fowler says. “And there are no giant security holes that cause it to go up in flames three months later.”
According to Fowler, a company that a lone entrepreneur can grow to $1 billion may not qualify as an entrepreneurial enterprise in the conventional sense. B2B logistics, which may be highly automated and isn’t one where clients want to work directly with a live person, was one category that came up as a potential in an informal working group we convened with other interested parties. Algorithmic trading systems managed by an individual investor were another. But that raises the question of what makes a one-person, billion-dollar company. According to Fowler, “whether you want to call that a “business” or not is kind of a question of semantics.”
The more important question is what happens when there is a single point of failure and one individual controls an influence worth billions of dollars.
According to Fowler, “if you manage to create a really killer product that has no security issues and is completely compliant, and 20 million people rely on it every day and you get hit by a car, if there’s no backup plan for that, it could just rip a hole in a lot of people’s daily lives and cause a lot of problems.”
Therefore, there are undoubtedly hazards involved. And I believe that when attempting to develop anything of this magnitude, individuals will need to consider all of those factors.
Shi thinks the focus on leanness will lead to firms that expand more quickly and effectively, regardless of the outcome of the race to $1 billion.
According to Shi, “speed of execution is one of the strongest and possibly only defensible points in the age of AI.” “You move more slowly and become more stuck when you have more people.”So, how can you maintain a very small and agile team while increasing and accelerating the speed of execution? You can stay on the ball when there are less people around.
