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AU Financial Review
a day ago
- Business
- AU Financial Review
How AI could create the first one-person unicorn
Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor, she confesses, does she 'speak AI'. But after her father died recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence start-up that would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved ones' affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals. Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage start-up than an established business. But besides herself, almost no human being is helping her build it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, Audos, which decided her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on Instagram. The Economist
Hindustan Times
12-08-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
How AI could create the first one-person unicorn
Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor, she confesses, does she 'speak AI'. But after her father died recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence startup that would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved ones' affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals. Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an established business. But besides herself, almost no human being is helping her build it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, Audos, which decided her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on Instagram. If her idea works out, the incubator will not only provide capital; its AI agents will support Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales, marketing and back-office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not need staff. In effect, AI helped her co-found the company. 'I can't tell you how empowering it was,' she says. Chart As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already adopted a neologism that describes one-person founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are 'solopreneurs'. In tech circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the first single-person unicorn—an unlisted firm worth more than $1bn. Some hope that generative AI will make starting a business so cheap and hassle-free that anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur much as anyone can become a YouTuber—a breath of fresh air in America's concentrated business landscape. Whether people like Ms Gwilliam will be able to escape the suffocating grip of the tech giants, however, is another matter. Technological revolutions have a habit of shaking up the way firms do business. The increased importance of machinery combined with the expansion of transport networks in the late 19th century led to the rise of giant corporations. Ronald Coase, a British economist, argued in his 1937 paper 'The Nature of the Firm' that their existence was a testament to the efficiency of consolidating and managing work within the confines of a business, rather than outsourcing activities to the market. That, however, began to change with the rise of digital communications. Not only could companies more easily outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost countries. They could also rely on internet platforms like Google for marketing and Amazon Web Services for computing. The rise of AI could well accelerate the trend, as semi-autonomous agents provided by Silicon Valley enable firms to perform the same amount of work with fewer employees. Henrik Werdelin, who co-founded Audos, says that the rise of cloud computing helped him start several new businesses over the past 20 years or so with little more than the swipe of a credit card to get going. He describes AI as the next wave in that 'democratisation'. 'You don't need to code, you don't need to be able to use Photoshop, because you can get AI to help with that.' This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of startups built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology but who have identified real problems to solve. Another evangelist is Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. It now offers a leadership course for executives in which they use generative AI to build a snack-food company in 90 minutes, using the technology to perform customer research, generate recipes, find suppliers and design packaging. In a recent paper, Mr Lakhani and his co-authors presented a field trial in which 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods company, were asked to address a real business need either individually or in two-person teams, with and without using generative-AI tools. It found that AI significantly boosted performance, helping individuals with AI match the performance of teams without it. AI proved to be more of a 'teammate' than a tool. With the era of free money over, founders are eager to find ways to keep costs down. Peter Walker of Carta, which helps startups manage equity ownership, says that founders used to boast about how many employees they had. 'Now it's a badge of honour to say, 'look how few people work for me'.' According to Carta's data, the median period it takes founders to hire their first employee after their startup incorporates has risen from less than six months in 2022 to more than nine months in 2024 (see chart). Base44, an AI-native coding startup, made headlines recently when it was sold to Wix, a web-development platform, for $80m. It had just eight employees. It is early days, of course. For one thing, AI agents are far from foolproof. In June Anthropic, an AI lab, revealed the results of an experiment in which its Claude Sonnet model operated a vending machine at the company's headquarters. The bot's goal was to avoid bankruptcy. It was good at identifying suppliers and adapting to user requests (including hunting for a tungsten cube mischievously requested by one employee). But it ignored lucrative opportunities, hallucinated, offered too many discounts and ultimately failed to make money. Other forces may also get in the way of an AI-infused surge in entrepreneurship. Despite the growth of the internet, social media, software-as-a-service and cloud computing over the past three decades, business formation in America was anaemic until the pandemic—the result in part of an ageing population. That demographic pressure will only intensify. For all the promise of generative AI, it poses problems for entrepreneurs, too. Annabelle Gawer of the University of Surrey notes that although the technology lowers barriers to entry for new businesses, it also makes it easier to quickly copy ideas. Unless a founder has unique expertise in their domain, that may make it harder to sustain a competitive advantage. Moreover, the provision of AI tools is dominated by tech giants and the labs they invest in, such as OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, and Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google. Ms Gawer draws an analogy with the rise of cloud computing in the 2010s, which those three tech giants dominate. Although that infrastructure has made life easier for startups, it has also left them dependent on the cloud triumvirate, which has been able to capture a good share of the value these firms have generated. Last year the trio's net profits were equivalent to 7% of America's total, up from 2% a decade before. Another galling possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller companies' best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine. What she calls 'first-mover disadvantage' could be 'a bummer', but it could also validate her idea. 'Maybe they'll come to me and say, 'We want Solace.' And then I'll be, like, 'Great, sold!'' Just like a typical entrepreneur, then.
Mint
12-08-2025
- Business
- Mint
How AI could create the first one-person unicorn
Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor, she confesses, does she 'speak AI'. But after her father died recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence startup that would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved ones' affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals. Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an established business. But besides herself, almost no human being is helping her build it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, Audos, which decided her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on Instagram. If her idea works out, the incubator will not only provide capital; its AI agents will support Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales, marketing and back-office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not need staff. In effect, AI helped her co-found the company. 'I can't tell you how empowering it was,' she says. As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already adopted a neologism that describes one-person founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are 'solopreneurs'. In tech circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the first single-person unicorn—an unlisted firm worth more than $1bn. Some hope that generative AI will make starting a business so cheap and hassle-free that anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur much as anyone can become a YouTuber—a breath of fresh air in America's concentrated business landscape. Whether people like Ms Gwilliam will be able to escape the suffocating grip of the tech giants, however, is another matter. Technological revolutions have a habit of shaking up the way firms do business. The increased importance of machinery combined with the expansion of transport networks in the late 19th century led to the rise of giant corporations. Ronald Coase, a British economist, argued in his 1937 paper 'The Nature of the Firm' that their existence was a testament to the efficiency of consolidating and managing work within the confines of a business, rather than outsourcing activities to the market. That, however, began to change with the rise of digital communications. Not only could companies more easily outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost countries. They could also rely on internet platforms like Google for marketing and Amazon Web Services for computing. The rise of AI could well accelerate the trend, as semi-autonomous agents provided by Silicon Valley enable firms to perform the same amount of work with fewer employees. Henrik Werdelin, who co-founded Audos, says that the rise of cloud computing helped him start several new businesses over the past 20 years or so with little more than the swipe of a credit card to get going. He describes AI as the next wave in that 'democratisation'. 'You don't need to code, you don't need to be able to use Photoshop, because you can get AI to help with that.' This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of startups built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology but who have identified real problems to solve. Another evangelist is Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. It now offers a leadership course for executives in which they use generative AI to build a snack-food company in 90 minutes, using the technology to perform customer research, generate recipes, find suppliers and design packaging. In a recent paper, Mr Lakhani and his co-authors presented a field trial in which 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods company, were asked to address a real business need either individually or in two-person teams, with and without using generative-AI tools. It found that AI significantly boosted performance, helping individuals with AI match the performance of teams without it. AI proved to be more of a 'teammate' than a tool. With the era of free money over, founders are eager to find ways to keep costs down. Peter Walker of Carta, which helps startups manage equity ownership, says that founders used to boast about how many employees they had. 'Now it's a badge of honour to say, 'look how few people work for me'.' According to Carta's data, the median period it takes founders to hire their first employee after their startup incorporates has risen from less than six months in 2022 to more than nine months in 2024 (see chart). Base44, an AI-native coding startup, made headlines recently when it was sold to Wix, a web-development platform, for $80m. It had just eight employees. It is early days, of course. For one thing, AI agents are far from foolproof. In June Anthropic, an AI lab, revealed the results of an experiment in which its Claude Sonnet model operated a vending machine at the company's headquarters. The bot's goal was to avoid bankruptcy. It was good at identifying suppliers and adapting to user requests (including hunting for a tungsten cube mischievously requested by one employee). But it ignored lucrative opportunities, hallucinated, offered too many discounts and ultimately failed to make money. Other forces may also get in the way of an AI-infused surge in entrepreneurship. Despite the growth of the internet, social media, software-as-a-service and cloud computing over the past three decades, business formation in America was anaemic until the pandemic—the result in part of an ageing population. That demographic pressure will only intensify. For all the promise of generative AI, it poses problems for entrepreneurs, too. Annabelle Gawer of the University of Surrey notes that although the technology lowers barriers to entry for new businesses, it also makes it easier to quickly copy ideas. Unless a founder has unique expertise in their domain, that may make it harder to sustain a competitive advantage. Moreover, the provision of AI tools is dominated by tech giants and the labs they invest in, such as OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, and Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google. Ms Gawer draws an analogy with the rise of cloud computing in the 2010s, which those three tech giants dominate. Although that infrastructure has made life easier for startups, it has also left them dependent on the cloud triumvirate, which has been able to capture a good share of the value these firms have generated. Last year the trio's net profits were equivalent to 7% of America's total, up from 2% a decade before. Another galling possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller companies' best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine. What she calls 'first-mover disadvantage' could be 'a bummer', but it could also validate her idea. 'Maybe they'll come to me and say, 'We want Solace.' And then I'll be, like, 'Great, sold!'' Just like a typical entrepreneur, then.
West Australian
12-08-2025
- Business
- West Australian
THE ECONOMIST: How Artificial Intelligence could create first solo unicorn as it rewrites the startup playbook
Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor, she confesses, does she 'speak AI'. But after her father died recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence startup that would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved ones' affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals. Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an established business. But besides herself, almost no human being is helping her build it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, Audos, which decided her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on Instagram. If her idea works out, the incubator will not only provide capital; its AI agents will support Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales, marketing and back-office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not need staff. In effect, AI helped her co-found the company. 'I can't tell you how empowering it was,' she says. As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already adopted a neologism that describes one-person founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are 'solopreneurs'. In tech circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the first single-person unicorn — an unlisted firm worth more than $US1 billion. Some hope that generative AI will make starting a business so cheap and hassle-free that anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur much as anyone can become a YouTuber — a breath of fresh air in America's concentrated business landscape. Whether people like Ms Gwilliam will be able to escape the suffocating grip of the tech giants, however, is another matter. Technological revolutions have a habit of shaking up the way firms do business. The increased importance of machinery combined with the expansion of transport networks in the late 19th century led to the rise of giant corporations. Ronald Coase, a British economist, argued in his 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm that their existence was a testament to the efficiency of consolidating and managing work within the confines of a business, rather than outsourcing activities to the market. That, however, began to change with the rise of digital communications. Not only could companies more easily outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost countries. They could also rely on internet platforms like Google for marketing and Amazon Web Services for computing. The rise of AI could well accelerate the trend, as semi-autonomous agents provided by Silicon Valley enable firms to perform the same amount of work with fewer employees. Henrik Werdelin, who co-founded Audos, says that the rise of cloud computing helped him start several new businesses over the past 20 years or so with little more than the swipe of a credit card to get going. He describes AI as the next wave in that 'democratisation'. 'You don't need to code, you don't need to be able to use Photoshop, because you can get AI to help with that.' This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of startups built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology but who have identified real problems to solve. Another evangelist is Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. It now offers a leadership course for executives in which they use generative AI to build a snack-food company in 90 minutes, using the technology to perform customer research, generate recipes, find suppliers and design packaging. In a recent paper, Mr Lakhani and his co-authors presented a field trial in which 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods company, were asked to address a real business need either individually or in two-person teams, with and without using generative-AI tools. It found that AI significantly boosted performance, helping individuals with AI match the performance of teams without it. AI proved to be more of a 'teammate' than a tool. With the era of free money over, founders are eager to find ways to keep costs down. Peter Walker of Carta, which helps startups manage equity ownership, says that founders used to boast about how many employees they had. 'Now it's a badge of honour to say, 'look how few people work for me'.' According to Carta's data, the median period it takes founders to hire their first employee after their startup incorporates has risen from less than six months in 2022 to more than nine months in 2024. Base44, an AI-native coding startup, made headlines recently when it was sold to Wix, a web-development platform, for $US80 million. It had just eight employees. It is early days, of course. For one thing, AI agents are far from foolproof. In June Anthropic, an AI lab, revealed the results of an experiment in which its Claude Sonnet model operated a vending machine at the company's headquarters. The bot's goal was to avoid bankruptcy. It was good at identifying suppliers and adapting to user requests (including hunting for a tungsten cube mischievously requested by one employee). But it ignored lucrative opportunities, hallucinated, offered too many discounts and ultimately failed to make money. Other forces may also get in the way of an AI-infused surge in entrepreneurship. Despite the growth of the internet, social media, software-as-a-service and cloud computing over the past three decades, business formation in America was anaemic until the pandemic — the result in part of an ageing population. That demographic pressure will only intensify. For all the promise of generative AI, it poses problems for entrepreneurs, too. Annabelle Gawer of the University of Surrey notes that although the technology lowers barriers to entry for new businesses, it also makes it easier to quickly copy ideas. Unless a founder has unique expertise in their domain, that may make it harder to sustain a competitive advantage. Moreover, the provision of AI tools is dominated by tech giants and the labs they invest in, such as OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, and Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google. Ms Gawer draws an analogy with the rise of cloud computing in the 2010s, which those three tech giants dominate. Although that infrastructure has made life easier for startups, it has also left them dependent on the cloud triumvirate, which has been able to capture a good share of the value these firms have generated. Last year the trio's net profits were equivalent to 7 per cent of America's total, up from 2 per cent a decade before. Another galling possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller companies' best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine. What she calls 'first-mover disadvantage' could be 'a bummer', but it could also validate her idea. 'Maybe they'll come to me and say, 'We want Solace.' And then I'll be, like, 'Great, sold!'' Just like a typical entrepreneur, then.
Washington Post
11-08-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Why AI will spark an entrepreneurial revolution
Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne are the founders of Audos and authors of 'Me, My Customer, and AI.' The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to follow a familiar pattern in American history: Technological innovations first trigger anxiety — fears over job loss and deleterious societal impact — and then unleash waves of productivity, creativity, entrepreneurship and wealth. But don't expect AI to be just the next incremental ripple. Rather, it appears poised to spark an entrepreneurial revolution of unprecedented scale — and not just for a few Silicon Valley unicorns. The reason lies in what's new about AI: It is a high-tech innovation with the power to democratize high-tech entrepreneurship in ways previous technological revolutions — even the dot-com revolution of the late 1990s — never could. Although the entrepreneurial spirit has always been central to the American identity, starting a tech business has remained out of reach for most. While 62 percent of Americans want to become entrepreneurs, only 9 percent ever take the leap. The barriers — technical complexity, the need for up-front capital, economic uncertainty and fear of failure — have historically been too much for most to overcome. AI is breaking these barriers, potentially enabling millions of everyday Americans to build sustainable businesses by leveraging this new technology to capitalize on their human expertise and creativity. This a powerful tool to be embraced, not feared, because it fundamentally transforms small business entrepreneurship in three ways. First, AI eliminates the technical divide. Building and investing in tech and start-ups has historically been concentrated in coastal cities and required specialized programming skills that excluded most Americans. Today, however, people with domain knowledge but without a technical background can create AI businesses that reflect their passions and meet an unmet need in their own communities. We've seen a sommelier with 30 years of wine experience build an AI-powered tasting service without writing a single line of code, and a nurse focused on nutrition develop personalized wellness programs at scale. In a human-AI partnership, what matters most is human expertise and relationship capital — not technical prowess. The entrepreneurs who thrive in the AI-enabled future will be those who use the technology to amplify human connection, not replace it. Second, AI dramatically accelerates business testing and market validation. The greatest risk that entrepreneurs face is investing time and money into ideas without knowing if customers will respond. AI tools enable rapid experimentation, allowing entrepreneurs to refine their businesses based on real customer feedback in days rather than months or years. This speed reduces both the financial and emotional costs of entrepreneurship. A dating coach we've worked with thought they could use AI to help more people find love. But when engaging with real customers, they quickly found greater, more specific demand from people navigating breakups — turning what could have been a failed business into a practice with potential. Third, AI erases the final barriers to global reach that the internet never fully solved. Real-time translation removes language barriers, 24-hour chat agents free entrepreneurs to do their most important and creative work. This global accessibility enables even hyper-specialized businesses to connect with enough customers worldwide to achieve sustainability, turning previously unviable niche ideas into thriving enterprises. Imagine a tree service professional whose years of experience writing estimates for clients can be encoded into an AI service that other tree trimmers around the world can use to streamline their businesses. AI can take care of localizing the service for linguistic and environmental differences while making the entrepreneur's knowledge exportable. Because of the way these AI-powered advantages are improving how entrepreneurs operate, the real transformation AI offers Americans won't result from the creation of a few more billion-dollar unicorns. This technology has the potential to create millions of million-dollar businesses — a distributed new breed of entrepreneurship where success is measured by sustainable income and meaningful work, not just hypergrowth and venture capital. This is not to say that AI doesn't present pressing challenges. It is without question an enormously disruptive technology. It will eliminate jobs, yes, but that's going to happen no matter what. The greater risk is that its benefits will be concentrated overseas or in other countries. The United States must embrace this moment by ensuring AI tools are accessible to everyone. This means investing in education that combines AI literacy with entrepreneurial thinking, and creating supportive policy frameworks that encourage experimentation. Recent White House executive orders are steps in the right direction. President Donald Trump's January executive order 'Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence' has now materialized into a comprehensive road map, 'Winning the AI Race: America's AI Action Plan,' released last week. The plan outlines more than 90 federal policy actions focused on accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure and leading in international diplomacy. Critically, it includes provisions for removing regulatory barriers that hinder AI development and promoting rapid buildout of data centers — exactly the kind of infrastructure support that everyday entrepreneurs need to access AI tools. These are the right priorities. This vision requires Americans to focus on their 'ikigai' — that unique intersection of passion, skill, market need and value — that AI can help scale. It means reimagining mom-and-pop businesses for the digital age, where local expertise reaches global communities through technology. It demands rethinking education to cultivate both technical understanding and entrepreneurial creativity from an early age. The success of this national AI strategy will ultimately be measured not just by our global competitiveness but by how many everyday Americans can participate in the AI-enabled economy. The question isn't whether AI will transform our economy — it's how we can make sure that transformation benefits as many people as possible, and how quickly we can lead the global pack. The answer depends on the choices we make today. Let's remember to embrace this technology with curiosity and creativity, finding ways it can create a new class of everyday entrepreneurs.
