About 65% of high-potential startups that fail die from co-founder conflict. Julian, who spent seven years matching co-founders before starting Solo Founders, answers the six questions people ask most about going solo: do you need a co-founder, is it as lonely as it sounds, who has actually done it, how do you raise money alone, do solo founders fail more, and what is "solo founder syndrome."

Topics covered:
- Solo founder vs co-founder: raise the bar; don't settle for a co-founder of convenience
- Why ~65% of startup failures trace to the founding team, and what that means if you're solo
- Loneliness as the solo founder's real failure mode, and "solo, together" as the fix
- Famous solo founders past and present: eBay, Dell, Zoom, Browserbase, WorkOS, Loyal, Polsia
- Fundraising alone: the pass as an easy out; investors reading your talent bar through your hires
- The dilution advantage: optimizing for investor quality over valuation
- The denominator delusion: the base-rate error behind "solo founders fail more"
- "Solo founder syndrome," debunked

Host: Julian Weisser, founder of Solo Founders; previously co-founded On Deck (ODF), where he ran the largest co-founder-matching program in tech for seven years.

The State of Solo Founding report: https://solofounders.com/report
65% figure: Noam Wasserman, The Founder's Dilemmas (Harvard Business School)

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)