The One-Person Unicorn: Why “The System” Won’t Allow It
A loner, outsmarting the rest of us? — Hardly. The rest of us learn right back.
The Launch Tweet We Want
One founder, one laptop, one billion. Agents build the product, write the copy, run ops while the human sleeps. It feels plausible. Even The Economist recently cheered the one-person-unicorn narrative — proof of how seductive the story is. Open-access AI turned scarcity into software. Why couldn’t a single, ruthless operator ride that wave?
Why It Feels Plausible
Distribution can be bought; prompts can be tuned; agents don’t unionize or quit. Copycats? Sure—but first-mover advantage plus brand plus a sprinkle of luck, and maybe you stay ahead. If the solution’s truly superior, the market should reward it. End of story?
Unmasking “The System”
Not quite. The missing character in that story is…everyone else.
We talk about “The System”. The term sounds like it’s a villain with a master plan. It isn’t. It’s customers, suppliers, platforms, regulators, competitors—people—each with a budget, a family, a job and a will to survive. And once your miracle product touches them, a chain reaction begins that doesn’t require conspiracy, only common sense.
Move 1: Openness Collapses the Secret
Whatever advantage you discover boils down to some new additional information (we call it delta information or ∆-info)—the extra know-how that makes each tiny task cheaper or better. In an open-access AI world, this Δ-info leaks fast: screenshots, prompts, agent recipes, off-the-shelf templates. Your edge has a half-life measured in days. This isn’t theft; it’s how learning spreads when the tool is public and the output is copyable. The exclusive becomes general knowledge—and general knowledge gets priced like water. If this knowledge could once be kept behind curtains, today’s all-too-helpful AI tools have pulled them wide open.
Move 2: Better Solutions Reveal Their Own Kill Switch
A solution that really understands a problem doesn’t just treat it—it exposes the root cause. Once the cause is visible, upstream fixes become obvious: a standard, a process change, a design tweak, a policy update. Upstream is cheaper because it prevents future tasks from existing at all. The more perfect your downstream service becomes, the easier it is for others to see how to make it unnecessary. And, once again, AI tools make that root fix obvious—and doable.
Move 3: Survival Incentives Do the Coordination
Your one-person service takes money out of existing pockets. Those people don’t meditate; they move. Big customers insource using the same public AI and your leaked workflows. Platforms reprice the inputs you depend on and rewrite the policies you skate on. Regulators codify the fix because it lowers risk system-wide. Competitors clone your features and sell at cost to defend share. No malice required—just self-preservation performed in parallel by thousands of actors. The result looks like one giant hand swatting you; it’s actually a million small hands, all doing the obvious, now aided by AI that gets better every week.
Could a One-Person Unicorn Still Slip Through?
Only under narrow conditions. If the root cause is intrinsically unfixable (physics, biology, human preferences), upstream can’t erase your demand. Or if no one with leverage can act—no platform to change defaults, no buyer large enough to set a standard—then downstream can persist. Brand and timing can buy you months. But the general claim—open tools + genius founder ⇒ billion-dollar solo act—fails once the rest of us react.
Pocket Test
- Openness: Could customers, platforms, and rivals use essentially the same AI to learn what you learned?
- Kill switch: Does your solution make a root fix legible upstream (a change that reduces the number of future tasks)?
- Survival: Do displaced actors have both motive and means to push that fix (budget, mandate, control of inputs)?
If the honest answer is yes to all three, the market that feeds you will shrink as knowledge spreads, upstream changes happen, and prices fall toward ~0. Not because a shadowy System said “no,” but because people refused to keep paying for an inferior arrangement once a better one was visible.
Closing
This isn’t omniscience; it’s a bet on open environments and human behavior. We copy what works. We standardize what saves money. We change rules when the old ones burn cash. So root for the solo founder—I do too. After all, every attempt brings us closer to solutions. Just don’t confuse a thrilling launch tweet with a stable equilibrium. If a one-person unicorn ever does endure, you’ll know why: the cause wasn’t fixable, the leverage wasn’t there, or the solution was never as perfect as it looked.