Zach Laberge dropped out of high school to build his first company. His second, Omen AI, puts real-time sensors inside the fluids that keep AI data centers and industrial machines running. He's 20, has no co-founder, and has raised $41.5M. He explains why having no technical co-founder forced him to learn spectroscopy himself, and why that made him better.

Topics covered:
- The shutdown test: how to know when to stop, and how to wind down well
- Restarting from your strengths: $3M raised in three days from the buyers who'd said no
- Customer-led pivots: engines to hydraulics to AI data-center coolant
- Being six months early, and the bitcoin miner who laughed
- Founding teams without co-founders; resetting the team at the seed
- Fundraising in a concentrated market: "the best round is when you're not raising"
- Advisors: weekly 1:1s and templated equity
- The bear case and the bull case for solo founding

Guest: Zach Laberge — founder & CEO of Omen AI (omen.ai), real-time fluid intelligence for AI data centers and industrial machines.

The advisor equity template Zach mentions: Founder Institute's FAST agreement, https://fi.co/fast

It's been a year since the Solo Founders Program kicked off. Today, the first cohort sits down to discuss building solo, together.

What a year of building taught them: why retention is growth (the smile curve, and the leaky bucket nobody checks), why free users are a "free trend" and not a business, how to kill a good idea to find the better one, and what a room full of other founders actually gets you. Plus the stories they lived before going solo — including co-founding with your dad at 17.

Topics covered:

• The prerequisite trap: why searching for a co-founder gets you a bad one
• Co-founder failure modes: family, close friends, and misaligned incentives
• Finding a co-founder by building (elevating a first hire)
• Retention is growth: the smile curve and the leaky bucket
• Hype signals vs. paying customers — the 10x question
• Solo, together: what a founder community functionally replaces

Guests: Aldo Del Valle (new company, prev. Happypath), Chai Choudhary (Workers.io), Namanyay Goel (Giga), Dhravya Shah (Supermemory)

John Glasgow is the anti-pattern founder: non-technical, 36 when he started, a newborn at home during Y Combinator, and solo after his co-founder left within weeks. After 15 years in corporate finance at Adobe, Fidelity, and Invoice2go, he built Campfire, the AI-native ERP fast-growing companies use to replace legacy systems. This is one of the most tactical conversations we've recorded.

Topics covered:

• The "right to win" filter: which ideas deserve your resignation letter
• The enterprise sales playbook from the buyer's side: champions, the $95K threshold tactic, budget cycles
• Surviving two years pre-product-market fit as a solo founder
• Founding at 36 with kids, and why deferring life causes burnout
• Why the technical co-founder requirement is over in the AI era

Guest: John Glasgow — founder & CEO of Campfire (campfire.ai), the AI-native ERP.