AI Is the Best CoFounder

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Side Project

AI is the best co-founder I have ever had.

That sounds like clickbait, but I mean it.

For years, the standard startup advice was to find a co-founder. If you were technical, find somebody who could sell. If you were good at marketing, find somebody who could code. Building a company was hard, and one person could not cover every job.

That advice made sense. It still does for some companies.

But the default has changed.

If I can test an idea by myself, I would rather start alone, use AI to fill the gaps, and keep going until I hit a problem that actually requires another person. Not a problem I might have one day. A real bottleneck in a real business.

This is not an argument against people. It is an argument against adding a permanent business partner before the product has earned one.

A co-founder is not just another set of hands

A co-founder can make a startup much easier. The right person brings energy, judgment, skills you do not have, and somebody to share the ugly days with.

The wrong person can end the company.

Even Y Combinator’s advice on finding a co-founder says you do not need one just because it feels like the proper startup thing to do. Their point is blunt: a great co-founder helps, but a bad one can kill the company.

People sometimes talk about finding a co-founder like they are filling an open role. It is much bigger than that. You are giving somebody a meaningful part of the company and a vote on what it becomes.

Now every large decision has another layer:

What should we build?

How quickly should we move?

How much money should we spend?

Should we raise funding?

When should we hire?

What happens if one person wants out?

YC has a separate list of 10 questions to discuss with a potential co-founder, including how you will handle disagreements and what happens if you no longer want to work together. Those are smart questions. They also show how serious the relationship is.

Sometimes all of that is worth it. It should not be a box you check because a startup playbook told you that teams look better on a pitch deck.

AI changed what one person can do

The original case for a co-founder was partly about coverage. There was too much work and too many different skills for one person.

AI does not solve all of that, but it covers much more than people want to admit.

I can use AI to:

Research a market and compare competitors.

Turn a rough idea into a working prototype.

Read an existing codebase and make a focused change.

Write tests and chase down bugs.

Draft a landing page, support reply, or launch email.

Review analytics and look for patterns.

Create images and App Store assets.

Push back on an idea before I spend a week building it.

That is not one job. It is pieces of product, engineering, design, support, marketing, and operations.

It also does not need equity, a calendar invite, or a vote. It does not care if I throw away the first draft and change direction. That is a ridiculous advantage while a product is still messy.

An OpenAI analysis of U.S. usage found that at least four million people used ChatGPT in March 2026 to help plan, start, run, or grow a business. Most were not chasing a billion-dollar startup. They were using AI as a flexible first hire because small business owners already do several jobs at once.

That is how I think about it too. AI is not just a coding tool. It is the first place I go when I need to move into a part of the business where I am slower or less experienced.

One person can cover a lot more ground before adding a team.

I have always built this way

I have spent more than a decade building side projects and products. A lot of them failed. A few turned into real businesses.

Weather Extension started with a simple need for an easy forecast in the browser. The Link Shortener Extension started as a small tool and gave me the distribution to build T.LY behind it. Link Shield came from the abuse problems I had to solve while running a URL shortener.

More recently, Golf Swing Camera came from the annoying process of recording golf swings with the normal Camera app. PxlShot came from wanting a useful Mac screenshot workflow without another subscription or cloud account.

The common thread is not a big founding team. It is noticing a problem, building something useful, putting it in front of people, and learning what happens next.

I wrote about the long list of things that did and did not work in Embracing Failure: The Journey of a Builder and Maker. AI would not have made every one of those ideas successful. Most products fail because people do not need them, do not find them, or do not care enough to pay.

AI does make each attempt cheaper.

That matters. I can try more ideas, get to a useful version faster, and stop sooner when the idea is weak. I can spend less time on setup and more time on the product decisions that still belong to me.

Fewer handoffs, faster decisions

One underrated advantage of working alone is that the whole product can stay in one person’s head.

There is no meeting to explain the idea. No ticket that loses the reason behind the feature. No waiting for somebody in a different role to get back to you. The feedback loop can be very short:

Notice a problem.

Ask questions.

Build the smallest fix.

Use it yourself.

Put it in front of customers.

Change it again.

AI fits that loop well. I can ask for five approaches, pick one, see it implemented, reject it, and try another without turning every change into a debate.

A human co-founder may have better judgment than the AI. They may catch the dumb decision I am too close to see. That is real value.

But not every button color, pricing test, or early feature needs a second vote. Most early decisions are cheap and reversible. Making them quickly is usually more valuable than making them perfectly.

Solo is becoming normal

This is already showing up in the numbers.

Carta’s 2025 Solo Founders Report says the share of new startups with one founder grew from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025. More than one-third of new companies in its dataset were started solo.

The funding numbers tell a different story. Solo-led companies represented 30% of startups founded in 2024, but received only 14.7% of the cash raised in priced equity rounds.

That gap matters if your plan depends on venture capital. Investors still tend to prefer teams.

If you are bootstrapping, it matters a lot less.

I would rather build the company that fits the product and the life I want than build the team an investor expects to see. Headcount is not progress. Revenue, retention, and useful products are progress.

AI is not always faster

There is plenty of hype around AI productivity, and some of it gets ahead of reality.

In 2025, METR found that experienced open-source developers took 19% longer on a set of realistic tasks when they used early-2025 AI tools. A 2026 follow-up found weak signs that newer tools were speeding people up, but the researchers were clear that the data was too biased to put a reliable number on it.

That matches my experience better than any giant productivity claim. AI can be extremely fast when the task is clear and the feedback is easy to check. It can also send you down the wrong path with total confidence.

I trust it most when I can verify the work:

Code has tests.

A page can be opened and used.

Research has sources.

Copy can be cut and rewritten.

An image can be inspected.

The founder still has to set the direction and decide what good looks like. AI gives me more attempts. It does not remove the need for judgment.

Working alone does not mean being isolated

AI is not a customer. It cannot tell me what somebody will pay for unless I talk to real people.

It is not a lawyer, accountant, security expert, or therapist. It has no reputation on the line. It does not carry the stress when production breaks. It cannot build trust with a partner or make a customer feel heard.

I still want smart people around me. I want customers who complain. I want other founders who will tell me an idea is bad. I want specialists when the risk is too high to fake my way through it.

The difference is that none of those people automatically needs to own half the company.

An advisor can advise. A contractor can finish a defined project. An employee can own an ongoing function. A friend can give honest feedback. A customer can explain the problem better than anyone.

A co-founder should bring something deeper: shared ownership, trusted judgment, real responsibility, and a commitment to build the company together for years.

Hire when the bottleneck is real

I am not trying to prove that one person can do everything forever. I want to build the smallest company that can serve customers well.

I would add a person when I can name the constraint:

Customers are waiting because I cannot support them and ship the product.

A proven sales channel is being ignored because nobody owns it.

A repeated task has enough volume to become a real role.

A specialist gap creates legal, financial, security, or product risk.

The business has the revenue to pay for help without betting on imaginary growth.

Another person’s judgment or relationships would be more valuable than another AI-generated draft.

At that point, hiring is not a startup ritual. It is a response to evidence.

This connects to what I wrote in Marketing Is the Hard Part. AI has made it much easier to build software. It has not made distribution, positioning, or product judgment easy. If the real bottleneck is getting the right people to discover and trust the product, hire for that. Do not keep adding code because code is the part AI makes comfortable.

My new default

The old advice was to find a co-founder before you start.

My advice is to start.

Build the first version alone. Use AI across every part of the work. Talk to customers. Keep your costs low and your decisions fast. Find out whether the product deserves more time before you divide the ownership and complicate the company.

If you eventually meet the right person and the business clearly needs them, great. A great human co-founder is still worth more than any tool.

But do not wait for one. Do not give away half the company because you need help making a landing page. Do not hire a team to solve problems you have not reached.

AI does not replace a great co-founder.

It replaces the need to go looking for one too early.