Does the one person unicorn exist? Or is it the startup version of a ‘cryptid,’ a mythical creature that is oft-discussed but may or may not actually exist?
I wondered that when chatting recently with Ben Broca, CEO and founder of Polsia, whose company offers an AI “co-founder” that claims to build and run an entire company autonomously. (You may recognize Broca’s name, as he was a very early employee at Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens.)
“You give [Polsia] an idea, and it will go ahead and build a product,” said Broca. “It will fix bugs. It will handle support. It will run marketing campaigns, including ads. It will do all of this autonomously. Every night, it wakes up, does work, and reports back via email to the user with what it has done, what it plans to do the next day, and how the general state of the business is.”
Broca is practicing what he preaches: He posted last week on LinkedIn that Polsia (whose investors include True Ventures) had hit a revenue run rate of $4.5 million—with him as the sole employee.
“Polsia is preaching solopreneurship,” said Broca. “I’m preaching letting go of the ‘99%’ that are not technical, not in Silicon Valley, not in New York, don’t have access to code. I want to give them a chance to survive in this new economy that’s going to be completely disrupted by AI.”
I’m famously skeptical of any and all revenue-related startup claims in the AI era. I told this to Broca, who says he believes Polsia’s revenue has some stability based on the level of user engagement he’s seeing. He also, despite being a “solopreneur,” does work with people. His central idea is one of an outsourced “virtual team.”
“That’s my crazy solution to the solopreneur problem,” said Broca. “I can leverage people, but in a different way. They don’t have to be full‑time employees… I can still have a GC with a law firm. I can have an infrastructure team with an infrastructure‑for‑agents company… and they’re incentivized for me to be as big as possible.”
But direct employees? For now, nope.
“Initially I was ‘for now I’m alone,’” said Broca. “And then, since online the response has been so overwhelmingly positive and people [are] amazed how much you can do, it’s becoming almost like an odd performance where I’m like, ‘Well, okay, how far can I go?’”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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