85% of the companies that get started in this town fail. Most startups fail because the relationships don't work out. Not because the product idea was bad or the market wasn't there. The design of the team is as important as the design of the product. If you're a second-time founder, you have the prior version of you as your co-founder, which is pretty great.
What's the bare case for solo founding?
Most people are so afraid to start that just starting is the hardest thing of all.
What's the case for solo founding? The good news is that it's never been easier to do that. Prototyping has never been easier. Accessing capital has never been easier. You believe that solo founding means literally being alone. This will not lead you to a good place. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
I know that you really like the book The Alchemist. I also really like it. It's one of my favorite books growing up. And I was flipping through it actually earlier today and I just looked at the inside cover and it felt like this perfect way to start things off. And again, never tried this with a book before. Never read into a microphone. So bear with me, but it starts off with: 'My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer.' The boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. 'Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.' It's quite the opener. I'm curious sort of what The Alchemist means to you and sort of how you think about that idea of suffering because I think that oftentimes people talk about entrepreneurship and starting things that are difficult as something that involves a lot of suffering.
Yeah. I mean, I love that quote because it talks about the fear of suffering is actually the thing that the heart fears the most. And I think that that's often the thing that I end up talking to people who are thinking about becoming founders is you're trying to convince them that starting a company, starting, you know, going on a mission is freedom. It's actually freedom from suffering. But most people are so afraid to start that just starting is the hardest thing of all. And I think that both The Alchemist and another one of my favorite books from high school, The Celestine Prophecy, which nobody really talks about anymore, but they're both about these people that go on these journeys and they have to trust their intuition and they have to learn a lot of lessons along the way about trusting themselves and their own power and the universe and the world to provide for them. Entrepreneurship is a lot like this where when you start, one of the things you don't realize is that just by setting the intention to go do it, the whole world conspires to help you along the way. And most people don't believe this. They believe that if I start, nobody's going to help me. I'm going to fail. I'm not going to be able to recruit anyone. I'm not going to be able to build a great product. You know, there's like this entire litany of things that people go through in their minds and they're all normal fears that we all have. And what they don't realize is if you just start, just by setting that intention and sending that message out into the world and telling everyone, 'I am starting, I'm going on this mission,' everyone tries to help you and the world begins to unlock and so many coincidences start happening and synchronicities. And that's the beautiful thing I think about being a founder and going on one of these journeys is how the world kind of opens up to you and The Alchemist is kind of one of the great stories of this.
You know, it's a really beautiful story. The writing is so simple and so kind of, it's really emotional to read it. You know, I have to reread it again soon.
I should too. It's been a while and my oldest son is 12 and I've been wondering whether he's about ready.
I think it's a perfect age probably. Yeah. You know, the character Santiago, he's a shepherd and he essentially sets off on his own which I think is interesting too because obviously entrepreneurship comes in many forms and for the longest time co-founders were kind of the default way of making companies and now we're starting to see sort of things change. This year, about 40% of companies have been started solo.
Oh, wow. I hadn't heard that stat. That's interesting.
Yeah. So, that's from Carta. And that's up from under 25% 5 years ago.
So, we've seen this significant increase. The reason I think it's interesting about this idea of going off kind of on your own is because you're not actually on your own. There's all of these other people who are sort of involved when it comes to building a company. I'm curious kind of how you think about the journey sort of building solo, getting started solo versus co-founders and kind of how that might impact some aspects of this being maybe more personal, potentially more lonely. But I'm curious, you know, when you think about that journey of sort of starting off on your own, you know, when you're with friends, it's like a road trip, you know, but when you're on your own, it's like a pilgrimage in a way. So I'm curious how you think about that. Yeah, I'm trying to remember that old proverb, you know, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Well, I think that that's an interesting stat to start off with. Because perhaps more than ever, we are not alone in the world anymore, right? Like people live an enormous amount of their life online these days. Social media has made it possible to feel not alone pretty much all your waking hours if you want to, right? And maybe that's a big driver. Obviously AI has become in the last two years, three years, an enormous input into this. People are, you know, I think if you used to lay in bed talking to a friend over text message or when I was younger it was AOL Instant Messenger, today you're like talking to AI and you're able to explore your thinking and get input into like the next actions you want to take in the world tomorrow in a way that just wasn't available a few years ago. So in those ways those stats make sense to me. I think that the other thing is that the process of being an entrepreneur, the knowledge behind that has become extremely available. When I was getting going in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, it was a dark art. Like you had to learn through mentorship. You had to find one of the few angel investors or venture capitalists that really understood the art or get mentored by the prior generation entrepreneurs. And some of it was on the internet but there was no YouTube, right? Like when I first got here, like YouTube didn't exist. And so it was like there was this book and that book. And today, you know, YouTube can be your co-founder. ChatGPT can be your co-founder, OpenClaw can be your co-founder, right? And so I think that's one of the huge changes that's happened in the last couple years. I'm really curious and we'll talk about some of these founders, solo founders that you've worked with because you've worked with a lot of them. Ben from Pulsia, Peter from OpenClaw, many others. The thing that I think is really interesting is sort of I think that oftentimes people think of startups as technology companies, which makes sense, but I think that they're also like works of art. And I'm curious sort of how you think about the art form of startups. I know that you're really interested in craft and design. But even beyond sort of craft and design, how do you think about the art form of startups?
Yeah, I mean it's funny you bring that up. I'm from Montana originally and a lot of my friends ask me what is it that you do for your job? Because it can seem like this opaque thing, right? And I actually think of myself as a producer not an investor. Because it's easier to explain what I do in the context of music than it is technology. And I always explain to people I'm like, well, you've probably seen musicians in the studio like on MTV when we were kids. You'd see like Behind the Music or you know I think people are always interested in what goes on behind the songs that they're interested in. And so you generally see this scene of like an artist in a booth recording a song and then there's people behind the soundboard helping to make that happen. And so I've always thought of what I do with technology and with entrepreneurs as production, right? And that it is art and that the journey of going on creating something is as much like you said, it's a human endeavor, it's a relational endeavor as much as it is the technology itself. I mean most startups fail because the relationships don't work out right not because the product idea was bad or the market wasn't there or some other factor it's that the relationship between you and the creative collaborators that are working on the art, it doesn't work out. And we see this happen in music all the time, too. Like bands don't stay together, right? And you don't get to hear your favorite music anymore. And I think oftentimes that's what's happening behind your favorite apps not working out. Or your favorite apps changing. I was seeing this morning that, you know, I won't say which one but there's an app out there on X today that everybody's talking about and wondering what happened like why did the UI change so and why is it so frustrated. And I think it's because the relationships changed and the creative, you know, something about the band changed right and the music's different and so now the app's not great. And so, that's one of the ways that I think about it.
The other thing that I like to think about is this idea of authorship. And with authors, you know, Paul Coelho, JK Rowling, these are people who wrote their stories themselves, but there's so many more people involved in creating the actual works. I mean, if you think about Harry Potter, I think that most people, putting aside even the films, I think that most people could remember when they were growing up, they could remember seeing the covers of these books and that probably had a really big impact on them. So, just the art alone, let alone the editing, the typesetting. There were so many people involved in actually making that work. And it kind of reminds me of startups in the same way, is that there's so many artists involved in making these things. It's not like there's one sole artist or in music as well. It also makes you think of film right which is like they talk of these ideas of like auteur filmmakers and there's Alfred Hitchcock but he also works, he's supposedly very controlling but he works with Edith Head who's like the most influential costume designer of all time. She was the one who was actually sort of calling the shots there. So even these sort of highly in control creators are still sort of deferring to incredible talent. I'm curious how you've seen that for people who are, it doesn't need to be solo founders specifically but for people who are sort of founder CEOs, how they've had this high degree of thoughtfulness and care and sort of a high degree of being opinionated but also not necessarily trying to call all the shots and sort of making sure that they have great people that they trust to actually do this, the Hitchcocks of the startup world.
Yeah, I mean I think that entrepreneurship, artists, no one's alone, right? Like you learn this, I don't know, I have three kids and one of the things you learn having kids is that no one grows up alone, right? My three and a half year old is like amazing to watch and you know you go around the world and like we were in Las Vegas last weekend to go to the Sphere.
And a friend of mine knows the Backstreet Boys manager and so we were like in Vegas, you know, I've never seen the Backstreet Boys. It was pretty great. Actually, but I watch my daughter walk around and, you know, she walks the wrong way and there's always an adult to help her go the right way, right? None of us grow up alone, right? And you realize this really quickly having kids. And I think the great artists, the great entrepreneurs, they're actually people who are willing to put themselves out there to try to find creative collaborations, to find relationships with people. And they're not afraid to search and search and search for the next great relationship that might create better creativity. And that's at least how I've certainly looked at life and a lot again how I look at what I do is I'm always in search of that experience, right? And it's different for everyone, right? Like we all go through life trying to find romantic partners and business partners and places to work and these types of things. And some people close up and they choose not to try to find the next great collaborator. But I actually think one of the things that defines the best entrepreneurs, the best founders is a willingness to try to find great people to collaborate with in the way that works best for you. And so, you know, I'm sure Alfred Hitchcock found that in Edith and that became a lifelong collaboration for him, I believe. And, you know, I started my career at Apple, right? And I was lucky enough to be there at a really cool time, when Steve Jobs was trying to rebuild the company. And the story goes that when he came back to Apple he was looking around for who to collaborate with and he found Jony Ive right and that collaboration which turned into a very long-term relationship and collaboration was an enormous part of making Apple into the Apple we know today. And so I think it's important to think about this that the relationships in a way are the product. And one last thing I'll say on this. When Steve Jobs died, I was talking to Jony back then. It was when I was working on Path and Jony was actually helping me and I was helping him a little bit with Apple stuff and I remember he said something to me that really hit me pretty hard. He said to me at one point, 'Dave, the design of the team is as important as the design of the product.' And that's really stuck with me ever since. And I think that's the true answer to your question, which is just that you can be alone. You can be a solo artist, but you're always going to be in massive collaboration, not just with the creatives around you, but ultimately with the customers, and the listeners, the people out there, the community of people that care about your product. You're going to be in relationship with them. You're not alone. And I think that's one of the keys to doing great art.
I think it was either Phil Lesh or Jerry Garcia who said like it's yours now. The music is yours, you know, it's like as soon as the band plays it and it's off, it's no longer the band's. It's the customers. It's whatever they're using the products for. And I think this is actually a really interesting sort of transition to talking about Peter and talking about OpenClaw because there's this very interesting dynamic with that project and you know it's not a company in the traditional sense it's this incredible sort of open source project now it's a foundation. But there's something really special about sort of how...
Yeah, it's art. It totally is art and there's something so special about the way it started but also the way that people have been brought in over time. You know it is not just Peter's, it's the world's and there are so many, I forget how many individual contributors who have actually made changes to the codebase at this point but so many probably more than most any project of its vintage.
Thousands. Yeah. So, yeah we have more people contributing than most of the labs have employees. Yeah it's incredible. So maybe share a little bit more about sort of how you first came into contact with Peter. I mean he actually, to my knowledge he solo bootstrapped his company to great success. Then he kind of came out of retirement because he was just so interested in all this stuff that was happening with AI and then after many name changes, OpenClaw. But I'd be very curious to hear sort of how you first got involved with Peter and started working on this together.
Yeah. So, I have a group chat from late 90s, early 2000s, friends of mine that have always been amazing internet artists, hackers, tinkerers, and one of my buddies from that sent me a message in December asking, this is December 2025 and asked me, 'Hey man, you got to check out this Claudebot thing.' And I was in Montana with my family for the holidays. And I was kind of busy and I was actually like kind of solemn. I wasn't sure like what 2026 was going to bring at that point in time. And so I didn't check it out the first day. And then the second day I installed it. And within like less than I don't know 12 hours, I had this feeling that I hadn't felt since I was a little kid. When I was like 7 years old, my grandfather gave me a Macintosh computer. And when he put it on my desk and I turned it on and I started using it, I had this just feeling that I could create anything and that it was mine and it was this powerful tool that like I mean it blew my mind. I mean in a way it charted the course for the rest of my life. Like that Macintosh computer became the thing that I created art on, right? And to this day, it's still the tool that's with me everywhere I go.
