Startups Lost Their Magic. AI Solo Founders Are Reviving It.
How the magic faded away (2008–2025)
Back in the early days of Startup Weekend, it was never about pizza and pitch decks or even your startup idea. It was about the community of organizers, the connectors delivering a simple value proposition to founders and pre-founders: you are not alone in a time of post-subprime economic collapse (ring a bell?)
This simple idea that you can launch a business in a weekend was at first hard to believe, but since then, and the explosion of hackathons following the same model, it has become normalized knowledge. Startup Weekend was often the first exposure to startups/the first startup event in 100+ countries, including Cuba!
What changed? In short, the community got hijacked by VC culture. The startup scene became obsessively focused on what venture capitalists want: Deal flow, often at the expense of grassroots fun. The community is now fine-tuned to get rich fast with that sweet VC money.
I remember a famous accelerator founder sneering at Startup Weekend as “crappy startups in a weekend” This was later proven false with stories like Zapier, or Rover, and some amazing result from Startup Next (the first ever pre accelerator feeding startup weekend alumnis to YC and TS) but yet we did have many crappy startups indeed from a VC point of view that is.
My point is not that we should not have “deal flow” for VC; my point is that it should not be at the cost of trial and error. How many founders got inspired or started at Startup Weekend and later built great startups? Killing that will also lead to crappy VC dealflow, especially from an economic perspective, and ultimately to deliver a greater capital impact, we need to support the full Entrepreneurial Journey (EJ)
Nowadays, it feels like if your idea isn’t a potential billion-dollar business, it gets dismissed right away, as if you knew what you would build at the early stage! The conversation too often starts and ends with “Is this VC-fundable? If not, f*** it! (NYC) or interesting (SF version of f u)
The irony is that most successful businesses aren’t venture-funded. A Kauffman Foundation review of 30 years of the Inc. 500 found that less than one in five of the fastest-growing companies had venture backing. (Another analysis by Amar Bidhe put it at under 6.5% !)
Worse, I’ve always suspected that VCs might actually have killed plenty of great startups. Angel investors would be happy with a 50M+ startup, while a VC would classify it as a failure. This is also often wrongly expressed as death by scaling too early (the reality is death by being forced to burn VC cash towards signaling growth)
Despite this, the narrative we naturally glorify the VC track as the only path to greatness. Don’t get me wrong, VC is needed and important; it is the main provider of innovative giants.
“VC-backed businesses make up about 77% of US public market capitalization, 81% of total patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office, and 92% of research and development (R&D) spend.2 Since 2001, 53% of all initial public offerings (IPO), and 70% of tech companies going public had VC backing, according to Professor Jay Ritter at the University of Florida.3 Still, venture accounts for less than 1% of total capital market assets.” -> source
But the economic tissue also needs to efficiently support all types of financial support, as we also know that “Small businesses created over 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019. In the previous business cycle, small businesses created 64 percent of net new jobs.” (source)
To bring back the magic, we need to reboot a community powered by the envy of building, not raising (even if it is, of course, fine). This is also common sense; VCs also want to invest in doers, not those who are good at signaling them.
Another issue this time within the VC industry is that VC has gotten concentrated in later stages, where there is less risk, leaving a gap in the early stage, especially for solo founders, as we will see later.
Investors concentrate money into safer stages, while the true pre-seed stage is often left high and dry. Early-stage funding globally dropped over 40% year-on-year. The result? A self-selecting loop where only those with enough personal money and/or insider connections can afford to tinker in the idea stage and survive the funding gap. Who knows how many promising ideas never see daylight because their creators couldn’t clear that hurdle?
It’s time to course-correct. And what an amazing time, thanks to AI and foundational models! Let’s get back to first principles and rethink how we start startups.
I want to show you a vision for rebooting founder communities in the age of AI, a vision that learns from the past but isn’t stuck in it, in the form of a new program called nc/acc. But first, let’s look at the foundations of this idea.
A tsunami of 100× solo-funded Startups is on the way.
One of the big reasons to reboot the startup community is the technological tidal wave we’re riding. AI has collapsed the barriers to starting a tech startup by overcoming the main blockages:
- Lack of tech talent (no more blocked by a lack of tech co-founder)
- The need for a co-founder as a way to execute when the lead founder (with the idea) cannot execute
- Less capital needed (fewer people cost)
- Language barriers to knowledge are gone
What used to take a team of 3, six months, and $500,000 can now be prototyped in a few hours by one determined founder armed with the right AI tools.
The implication: we’re headed toward a world where not 10,000 startups launch each year, but hundreds of thousands, even a million, over the next decade.
“The bottleneck to entrepreneurship isn’t the ability to code, co-founders or capital anymore. What’s left is to develop access to social capital” -Franck Nouyrigat
The knowledge of what is possible now will take some time to propagate, but at the end of the day, the playing field for innovation is leveling: there are ~30 million software developers today, and with AI assistance, that number could effectively explode to 300 million within a few years! Anyone who can read and write in any language can become a “developer” if he/she wish to.
I’ve seen that when I tested the 90-minute format in Tallinn and Paris ,I was shocked by the quality of startups produced in 90minutes, vastly outpacing what I’ve seen a decade ago at Startup Weekend after 54 hours of work.
The “providential CTO co-founder” problem is gone; you no longer need to beg a friend to join you to handle the coding or the design; your AI tools can fill in a lot of those gaps.
Knowledge barriers are lower, costs are lower (think cloud services and open-source models), and even language barriers are falling thanks to AI translation and localization. This democratization isn’t theoretical; it’s happening, just not evenly distributed yet.
“All of this means we need a startup community model that can support a million new founders, not just a chosen few. “
The old venture-centric model optimized for finding the next Zuckerberg in a Stanford dorm won’t cut it when talent is everywhere and building awesome stuff in some remote village in Nigeria. It’s exactly at this moment when starting is “cheap” that I want to support founders!
Solo-founders are the new tech stars
Yesterday’s conventional wisdom said you must have co-founders to share the load.
With AI as leverage, a solo-founder can effectively wear ten hats: engineer, designer, marketer, customer support, you name it. AI doesn’t complain or sleep; it scales you. We are at the dawn of a solo founder revolution powered by these tools.
Sam Altman predicted that very soon we’ll see a one-person company reach a billion-dollar valuation. This was unthinkable a few years ago. But today, it’s not crazy to imagine one person (with a cloud of AI agents at their disposal) scaling to millions of users or revenue.
The story of Maor Shlomo, who bootstrapped an AI startup in six months and sold it to Wix for $80 million, was a solo founder!
This isn’t to say every solo founder will strike gold or that teamwork is obsolete. Rather, the option space has widened.
But here’s the real paradigm shift: Alongside a few one-person unicorns, we will also mechanically witness millions of smaller successes.
Think of startups that might “only” make $1–10 million a year (I affectionately call them minicorns 🦄🦋).
Individually, these businesses won’t dominate headlines, but collectively, they can disrupt entire industries by a million cuts.
It’s the long tail of entrepreneurship: a vast swarm of highly specialized, lean companies nibbling away at the incumbents. If you’re a big corporation, it’s about to become very hard to keep track of all the tiny competitors eating your lunch.
It’ll be, as Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, said, “a good time to be paranoid” if you want to survive! I’m looking at you, SAAS companies, overcharging us!
AI is supercharging individual potential at the exact moment when many talented folks are disillusioned with the traditional startup path (raise money, burn money, pray for unicorn status).
The share of startups with solo founders (and no VC funding) jumped from 22% in 2015 to about 38% in 2024, according to a Carta report. Solo founders are no longer an anomaly; they’re a movement. Yet many investors still shy away, stuck in the old mindset that a lone founder is a red flag.
That will change, it has to, because solo-led companies are proving they can be sustainable and scalable.
You can check our manifesto about supporting this revolution on nocap.so
In this new world, communities will be crucial. Solo doesn’t mean alone. The solo founders succeeding today are the ones tapping into networks of peers, online communities, and mentor groups. They might not have a co-founder, but they have a support system. Our goal is to make NoCap that support system on steroids AI matching founders to exactly the help they need, when they need it, so no one building solo ever truly builds alone.
Community is the moat for AI startups
In AI circles, there’s endless debate about moats. What’s your startup’s defensible advantage? In the age of AI and “GPT wrappers,” some say data is the moat; others say it’s all about algorithms or maybe first-mover advantage. I have a different take: the only real moats are going to be brand and community.
In other words, your tribe of true believers.
Everything else is increasingly copy-paste. Foundation models are all converging to similar capabilities, limited by one thing: access to electric and computational power.
Any clever feature you build, an open-source equivalent might pop up next week. Even proprietary data advantages can erode over time. But an authentic community and a trusted brand? Those compounds. They’re hard to build, hard to fake, and nearly impossible to replicate.
People are starting to notice this. And what creates that trust and love? Community. Authenticity. Actually caring about your users and engaging them.
I’ve been obsessed with founder communities for over a decade, from organizing Startup Weekends to developing verifiable e-voting technology at electis.com.
We designed nc/acc with this philosophy at heart. We’re not just trying to pump out demo day pitches; we’re cultivating a global tribe of founders who will support each other for years. The focus is Ready Day, not Demo Day.
Our AI plays the role of a super-connector, facilitating mentorship and knowledge-sharing at scale, but always with a human touch, effectively functioning as a p2p startup studio as I wrote about last year
She’s (our AI) like a community manager who never sleeps:
- Need to find someone who’s an expert in fintech user acquisition? NoCap will identify them and introduce you.
- -Feeling discouraged at 2 am because you hit a setback? NoCap’s there with a pep talk or a success story of someone who pushed through a similar challenge.
The AI is a means to an end, and that end is a more connected, empowered community where everyone genuinely wants the best for each other.
Solo founders will not be lonely founders; the need to build such a community at scale is clear, and the only way to scale it efficiently is with AI.
Startup weekend was limited in its scale by the cost of having regional structures to support organizers and a lack of a solid business model relying heavily on sponsorship. Taking that lesson to no cap, we will scale and increase the quality while at one point investing, but that will come second.
Solo founders will not be lonely founders
From startup community to early-stage data to replacing VCs with AI
If AI can help people build startups and communities, why not help fund them too? The way founders and investors interact is ripe for an overhaul. A fully automated venture capital fund is in its early days. There are a couple of AI models, some public, some not.
Consider the traditional fundraising process: founders hustle to craft the perfect pitch, warm intro, and deck; VCs sift through hundreds of decks and rely on gut instinct, pattern matching, or biased networks to pick a few winners. It’s an inefficient, relationship-driven game that often overlooks great founders who aren’t well-connected or who don’t fit the pattern.
I experienced it when working on Massive early on with my co-founder, Brian. We were part of Launch with Jason Calacanis and had frequent pitch sessions with VCs. I remember this one time I had a rough day, it impacted my pitch (I sucked!), while on another good day, we would get tons of interest from founders. It was the same startup, the same product, the same team, the only difference might have been the order of the words that came out of my mouth and the tone of my voice. It seems insane that this data impacts an investing decision, and yet it does. Even worse, it creates this loop that will also get picked up by VC using AI (see below about haircuts) that will be convinced that repeating such a pattern is the way to pick the winners!
Just picture an AI-driven fund where deal sourcing, due diligence, and even investment decisions are largely automated.
It would analyze startups on their merits, traction, unit economics, and team skills (perhaps assessed via AI interviews) without human bias clouding the view.
No old boys’ club, no pattern bias that says you need to be a Stanford CS dropout to get funded. Just data and results. In theory, this could back far more founders in a fairer way, at lower cost.
The greatest predictor of venture success at an early stage is not your startup idea but who you are and your talent (and maybe your haircut! see below)
The greatest predictor of venture success at an early stage is not your startup idea but who you are and your talent (and maybe your haircut!)
Now, I’m not naïve. Venture capital involves a lot of human nuance, and an AI fund will have its own risks (an algorithm could easily reinforce biases as I explained before if we’re not careful in its design, or chase only the metrics it knows, missing the “zero to one” vision bets).
Even some famed investors have scoffed at the idea (Marc Andreessen half-jokingly predicted that VC would be one of the few jobs safe from AI’s takeover). Well, Marc, challenge accepted! 😁
At NoCap, we’re not building an AI VC fund yet, but we are laying groundwork for a new founder-investor dynamic, starting with a community that might or might not want or need funding. This neutral approach will allow us to have real early-stage data that will really serve and help the community, not just measuring fundability.
Our system will track your product metrics, team skills, and execution over 3 weeks (and beyond), creating a rich picture of what you’ve accomplished.
Down the line, it’s easy to imagine this feeding into an automated due diligence report or even plugging into investor algorithms. Founders might opt in to get matched with capital in a very “pull” way, offers will come to you, no need to spend months not working on your product.
The future of fundraising with Ai investors will be passive, your data will be the pitch.
And don’t worry, we still love our human investor friends! The point isn’t to cut VCs out entirely, but to get the ecosystem to become more efficient and founder-centric, bringing back venture capital to what it is: a tool.
In a world with a million solo-funded startups, we will need AI anyway to allocate capital efficiently at high volume and high speed.
Introducing No Cap Accelerate (nc/acc): An AI-First Founder Community (in Beta)
What is No Cap, and what is nc/acc, and how is it related to this long post?
I met the No Cap team (YC 23, amazing Jeff and Alex) a few months ago after I had seen their work on building the first-ever AI investor.
At that time, I had already explored some of the above ideas, but I was missing the right AI to experiment with them. We started to work together on building a program dedicated to solo founders and rethinking how accelerators and the startup community work in the age of AI. We call this new “thing” nc/acc for No Cap Accelerate. Note, we did not call it an accelerator on purpose.
Think of nc/acc as a Startup Weekend meets YC reinvented for 2025 on AI steroids, with a dash of Hogwarts magic and a ton of AI horsepower. Instead of a weekend, it will be 90 minutes of vibe coding, and instead of 3 months, it will be 3 weeks.
You can read how it works or just go straight now to -> nocap.so <- , i recommend using Telegram as an interface.
Here’s how it works: NoCap’s AI will first have a conversation with you, getting to know who you are down to the details of your motivations later, it will prepare you for the ceremonial common ritual of the 90minStartup followed by the House placement ceremony (inspired by Steve Blank’s classification of startup types, much like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter. You will then meet your circle (e-roomates) who will act as a small group of peers who complement you.
Every founder is unique, but by grouping folks with compatible strengths and ambitions, everyone can move faster together.
The core program runs for 3 weeks. It’s an intense (or not if you’re busy -she will adapt to you!) but human-centric experience.
We did our best to make it anything but cold and robotic. We emphasize peer-to-peer accountability with the circles, inspired by the p2p mentoring models done by https://pioneer.app/ and https://angelpad.com/b/anti-yc/
No Cap plays the role of a headmaster, where she will help you push towards ambitious yet realistic and measurable goals based on your profile and time constraints. Those measurable goals are then tracked to allow No Cap to position you with a % of progression. (e.g, 50% to get funding)
Finally there’s a “graduation” at the end to celebrate progress, with top teams or individuals featured. This is not a demo day, but more of a feature of the best stories/progress to inspire others.
Crucially, after 3 weeks, the program doesn’t just drop you. NoCap (our AI persona) will keep working with you and nudging you toward your goals for as long as you need.
We were inspired by Salman Khan that learning works best when you can go at your own pace until you’ve truly mastered the material, and that time constraint education can prevent the greatest students from emerging. The same happens with accelerator static programs focused on the Startup Beauty contest days.
We think an adaptive timeline yields better outcomes, just as self-paced mastery in education leads to deeper learning. This was, of course, not possible before, but as we are building an AI power program resources to scale easily at no cost.
To recap, the nc/acc flow is as so:
👋 Welcoming by No Cap Ai
↓
✍️ learning about you→ 🎮 Pre-Game prep→ ⏱️ 90min Startup initiatic ritual -> 🎩 house selection → 🏠 3 weeks of p2p momentum → 🎓 Graduation → 🚀 Ready Day at your own pace -> 📢 Visibility and or $ via intro to Angels or VCs … (until we launch ours)
📱 Access via Telegram and Email / 💬 P2P Circles with real humans / 📊 online Dashboard to track progress
Everyone is welcome to try nc/acc!
no application gatekeepers, no equity, just join and to the onboarding with an AI like you would with a human. If you have an idea (or even if you don’t yet), you can join at nocap.so it’s that easy!
The soul of Startup Weekend is alive in nc/acc, and this time, it scales with AI (I will reach out to the Startup Weekend organizers once we’ve learned from our Beta).
How much will we invest in solo-founders?
For now, we have not built a fund nor want to invest; our goal is simply to help solo founders at the earliest stage, even pre-idea, to build. Some might need funding, others will bootstrap. Once we learn from launching the beta, the intent is to start introducing the best startups to our venture or angel partners, leaving the option to the founders. Later on, we will indeed invest, so stay tuned on that, but if you’re a solo founder who doesn’t want or need VC nc/acc is designed for you, and if you are looking to raise, then great nc/acc is also for you!
Online but human and offline first
Our beta opens now with the beginning of the program starting on September 13, with our 90-minute Startup ritual online and offline in SF on Sept 13. We intend to first fine-tune the overall online program and later launch physical communities where we will leverage AI to capture all the data possible physically at the event using things like Limitless. All that data will only have one goal: Helping the founders without distracting them from building.
Everyone is welcome, whether you’re a veteran founder or just someone with a spark of an idea and the curiosity to see where it could go. Don’t wonder if this is for you, IT IS!
Oh, we also have a prize, check it out: LinkedIn post
No Talk, All action is back!
