The Lonely Unicorn

A unicorn that needs no humans helps no humans.

Here is a test for any company you are thinking of building. Or joining. Or investing in.

If it disappeared tomorrow, would anyone mourn it?

Not would the customer find another vendor. Not would the investors lose money. Mourn. As in, would someone sit in their car after they got the news and wonder who they would be now if they had never walked through the doors.

Hold the test in your head. I am going to ask you to apply it.

Sam Altman is running a betting pool. Inside his group chat of tech CEOs, the wager is the year the first one-person billion-dollar company arrives. Dario Amodei put 70-80% odds on this year. The first contender is already here. Medvi, a GLP-1 telehealth startup launched out of a Los Angeles home in September 2024 with twenty thousand dollars and zero employees, posted $401 million in first-year sales. It is tracking to $1.8 billion this year.

Apply the test. If Medvi disappeared tomorrow, who would mourn it?

Customers would find another telehealth provider before lunch. There are no employees to lose their place. No managers who shaped anyone. No offices that became neighborhoods. No first jobs that started anyone’s career.

A unicorn that needs no humans helps no humans. That is what is wrong with the dream.

Here is what changed. AI agents collapsed the cost of execution. Work that used to require people you hired, trained, and paid — the design, the code, the support ticket, the bookkeeping — can now be rented by the API call. Suddenly the floor under “you need a team” disappeared.

But the floor was holding up more than execution. It was holding up purpose. I know because I lost a company once before I built one.

I was an leader at a cybersecurity market leader. Their mission was protecting people, businesses, and societies from cyber threats. Steve was the CEO. He was my mentor and my idol. One Wednesday evening, I was told he was leaving.

I couldn’t work the next day. I wandered the office. I got coffee with the team. I walked hallways I’d walked a thousand times and didn’t see them. That night I grabbed a drink with people I loved working with and came home late to tell my wife. The next morning the gossip had multiplied. What the board would do. Why. What came next.

It became clear to me. I believed in Steve. I believed in the vision we had built around him. Neither was real anymore. The company would keep going. The salary would keep arriving. The title would keep working on a resume. But the future I had bet my career on had quietly left the building.

I quit. No fallback. No other job lined up. It wasn’t a rational decision. It was the right decision.

What I built next was small. Lonely, at first. I left a comfortable paycheck and walked my network for months looking for a problem worth a decade. We landed on a personalized CRM for small businesses — software to help them build the kind of client relationships that survive bad quarters. I raised a little money. Found a first customer. None of that made the company real.

Camila did.

Camila was my first unpaid intern. She showed up because she believed in what we were trying to build, not because we paid her. We couldn’t. Then the first full-time employee said yes for less than market. Then ten more people did the same. They took less pay because they believed in the team and the mission. For two and a half years, what held us together wasn’t revenue or fundraising. It was the people in the room.

I remember the highs. I remember the lows more clearly. What I remember most is who was there.

If you are a founder reading this, you are being told two things at the same time. The first is that AI agents can replace most of the people you would have hired. That is largely true. The second is that you should be glad about it. That is the part that should worry you.

Let me give the solo-unicorn crowd their best argument. They will say: every revolution displaced workers, and every revolution created new sectors that absorbed them. Cotton gins, assembly lines, the internet. Each one was supposed to end work. Each one ended specific kinds of work and started new ones. The solo unicorn is the same story. Productivity rises. New industries form. Workers move on.

That argument has one problem. Past revolutions created new jobs. This one creates one job per company. The founder.

Then comes the second claim. Middle management is bloat. Layers slow things down. Flat is faster. Jack Dorsey told Block it had too many managers. Elon Musk gutted Twitter’s middle layer overnight. Mark Zuckerberg called it the year of efficiency and cut tens of thousands. The solo unicorn is just where that logic ends. Kill the managers. Then kill the team. Keep the cash flow.

What they are missing:

Middle management isn’t supervision. It is connecting tissue.

A manager’s actual job is to take an individual and grow them into a bigger version of themselves. To translate the company’s purpose into the daily decisions of people who can’t see the whole map. To notice when someone is about to break, and when someone is about to break out. Strip that tissue out and you don’t get a flatter, more agile company. You get a founder with a megaphone, agents executing tasks, and a base with no path forward.

Ask anyone who impacted them most in their professional life. They will tell you a name. They will tell you about a manager, a mentor, a CEO who pulled the future a little closer. Nobody answers that question with the name of a product. Nobody answers it with a tool.

Build a company nobody can answer with. That is the solo unicorn.

Here is what is being sold to you, founder.

You can build a billion-dollar company alone. You can keep the equity. You can skip the politics, the hiring mistakes, the culture work, the 2 AM Slack messages, the firings that haunt you.

You can also skip the only part of the work you will remember.

Ten years from now, the founders of the first solo unicorns will be billionaires. They will also be alone. Their company will exist on exactly one LinkedIn page. Their own. Their press will be the press of someone who built a P&L. Not the press of someone who built a place.

Apply the test one more time.

If your company disappeared tomorrow, who would mourn it?

If the answer is just you, you didn’t build a unicorn. You built a hobby with an exit.

I think about the office I walked that Thursday after Steve left. Same walls. Same desks. But the place wasn’t a company anymore.

Unicorns we ever celebrated were not the ones with the largest numbers. They were the ones whose absence the world would have felt. Companies that gave someone their first paycheck. Their first mentor. A promotion that taught them who they were.

So who is the unicorn for?

Choose the answer carefully. You only build one career.