I am a high schooler who has been running a $50M+ startup completely solo for almost a year. Here is what I learned:
thanks to AI, it is more than possible to build a unicorn with a 2-3 person team, but it is like playing Minecraft on ultra-hardcore mode with 3 hearts instead of 10. It will stress you out, put you through agony, and force discipline on you like nothing else.
First, why would I even run a startup alone?
For context, I dropped out of 11th grade from pretty much third-world country, and my school was still figuring out how to use GPT-3.5 while I was shipping 5k+ lines of code per day during class.
90% of people around me did not even know what a startup was and were more interested in traditional career paths like investment banking or nursing. Ever since I was little, I wanted to take the biggest risks possible, so building a company felt like the obvious path.
Since no one around me cared about building something huge, I dropped out, pursued my dream of becoming a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and flew to SF for Y Combinator Summer 2025. Here I am today, still in the trenches, but in the funniest and most intense period of my life.
1) You become really good at multitasking.
When you are solo, you handle everything at once: sales calls, bug fixes, and talking to users. I set up automations to route support tickets to my phone, bought extra monitors to keep Slack and Twitter open 24/7, and coded in Ubers.
It gets really chaotic after a couple of weeks, and I would not recommend this path to most people. But over time, it sharpens your critical thinking and teaches you how to prioritize under pressure and break down tasks faster.
2) You have to be terminally online.
I am known for replying at AI speed. Not because I use AI to reply to everyone, but because I am addicted to my phone and obsessed with customers.
When a user messages me, I reply in 10 seconds and try to fix things immediately, even if I am on the toilet. In the early days, iteration speed and how fast the founder fixes bugs matter more than polish. Customers usually respect that.
3) AI 10x’s you as a founder, engineer, designer, and more.
As a solo founder, you learn very quickly how to use it well. You notice nitpicks others miss, stay glued to Twitter to keep up with AI research, and adopt tools as early as possible.
I was one of the first people obsessing over file systems and researching how agents should fundamentally interact with humans. Combine laziness with AI addiction, and it becomes a ridiculous productivity weapon. Leveraged properly, it can compress years of learning into months.
There is definitely more I would love to share, but these were the first things that came to mind. Thanks for reading.
(i started hiring 1 mo ago hence wrote this)
