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- 📝 Solo Founders Report 2026
📝 Solo Founders Report 2026
👉 Most startups already behave like solo-led companies. I explain why that works, where the bias comes from, and what the data actually shows.
Egemen Eres
January 07, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
👋 Hey — Egemen here.
The term “solo founder” has always been polarizing.
Some can’t imagine building a company alone.
Others see it differently.
From experience, they know most companies already operate this way.
There is usually one person making the final calls, setting direction, and carrying the weight.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: Get the investor view of your AI customer journey
🧠 Deep-Dive: Solo Founders Report
🗺️ Method: AI Product Discovery
⚾️ Catch: Ads That Makes Sense
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: xAI
💡 Spotlight
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🧠 Deep-Dive: Solo Founders Report 2026
I came across yet another fantastic piece on Carta the other day.
I think solo founding works because most startups already function that way, whether people admit it or not. The data makes this hard to ignore.
A large share of companies start with one founder and a meaningful number stay that way well into seed and beyond. If solo founding were fundamentally broken, we’d see a sharp drop early on (but we don’t).
Early-stage startups do not fail because one person made too many decisions. They fail because decisions took too long. Solo founders remove that ambiguity.
Fundraising bias is real, but it is not rational. Teams raise earlier because they feel safer, not because they execute better. Once a solo founder shows traction, that bias weakens fast.
The argument against solo founders usually relies on hypotheticals. Burnout. Blind spots. Loneliness.
Look, I’m not saying those aren’t real risks, but they are not unique to solo founders, and they are not solved by adding a co-founder by default.
They are solved by designing the company properly.
Being a solo founder is a growing trend and data suggests that across the globe.
👉 Solo founding is not a compromise and not a red flag, and sooner or later VCs will understand that too.
🗺️ Method
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop, but people still drive decisions. Levanta’s research shows affiliate and creator content continues to influence conversions, plus it now shapes the product recommendations AI delivers. Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified.
⚾️ Catch
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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: xAI
xAI pushing toward a ~$230B valuation is less about fundamentals and more about strategic positioning - it’s the scale of the week!
Capital at this scale is a signal to the market that xAI is being treated as infrastructure-level competition, not a normal startup.
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