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In the recent episode of The Ben & Marc Show, which features a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the question was asked, “Do you think it’s finally possible for a one person billion dollar startup?”
Andreessen said, “You could put a whole bunch of things in this bucket…it’s the inherent scalability of software and the internet but you could also put AI,” he added that you could also do it using a lot of work getting outsourced.
He added funnily a billion dollar startup of one person already exists and it is called Bitcoin. Horowitz adds his bit that it is actually a trillion dollar company. The best part is that all of this is actually somehow possible using AI and Copilot.
Andreessen said that it is possible that super geniuses in the coming 20 years would be able to crack this using just AI and Copilots. Horowitz added, “the internet is actually probably in some ways a bigger breakthrough than AI,” while also saying that we might see a few companies like these.
On the other hand, Horowitz also added that he is a little skeptical about the capabilities of AI. “The distance between what we can do now with co-pilot to complete human elimination just in terms of the technologies that we’ve seen like that last last mile is a long mile,” he said, adding that all of a company’s coders become AI is highly unlikely at the moment.
Though not a one person company, Andreessen highlighted that Instagram had billions worth of sales with only 11 people and WhatsApp had 15 plus billion sales with 50 people.
This conversation is similar to what OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said in an interview. “We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon…in my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.”
Moreover, Altman also said in a recent interview that GPT-4 is the dumbest model that we would ever have to use and the upcoming models are going to be a lot smarter.
