Why founder backgrounds matter
These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun, where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI? This is a daily conversation topic.
(And also, a plug: This week is actually the final week to apply for the upcoming SF residency where you can work out of our offices, hang out with me, and start your next company. Deadline to apply is this Sunday, November 1st.)
The new founder archetypes
A while back, I talked to Ben about the new opportunities laid out by AI for solo founders. The question is, does AI give individual founders so much leverage that they can build a huge company just by themselves – you don’t need a business/technical cofounder delineation – and one person can just do it? The discussion starts at ~5:00:
There’s no doubt that AI will empower solo founders. In the past, what might have required two cofounders for business+technical, or three for product+technical+GTM, maybe can be boiled down to a solopreneur. On the other hand, Ben’s point is that maybe the v1 of a product, or what’s expected as a seed-stage startup just goes up. If a team of cofounders is multipled 100x and thus can make more progress than a solopreneur that’s 100x, then maybe the team still wins.
The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of – and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here:
- Solo founders
- Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before
- Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress. Maybe you can agentically code but someone still needs to do a million meetings with customers. Maybe coding was never the main bottleneck for startups in the first place?
- Non-technical founders
- Why: There’s elite talent that comes from areas like finance, consulting, who can’t code but are passionate about business. There’s also folks in creative industries who create all day but just not in code. Now they can build
- Why not: Why not: Maybe AI makes it easier to build a prototype, but there’s still a big gap between a demo and a reliable product that can scale. If everyone can build the first version, maybe technical judgment becomes more important in deciding what to build, what’s actually possible, and how to stay ahead as the product gets more complex. (especially true for product categories like dev tools/etc)
- Domain experts
- Why: A doctor who works at a hospital understands all the problems they face each day. A real estate broker really gets the subtleties of their markets, their clients. Same with a soldier, teacher, etc. What if they could use software to solve their own problems and build business along the way?
- Why not: Hoteliers didn’t create Airbnb and the finance industry didn’t create Kalshi. Sometimes you just need an outsider’s view in order to reinvent an industry, versus building incremental improvements
- Kids, high schoolers, college students
- Why: Young people have already been building products early on. Start with a Minecraft mod, a Roblox game, a Discord bot, and suddenly you’ve learned how to make something that thousands of other people use. Now add AI, and a kid with an idea can build way more, way earlier
- Why not: Building something your friends love is very different from building a company. You still have to hire, raise money, manage people, and figure out how to make money. And maybe young founders have an advantage in consumer products because they understand their peers, but much less of one when it comes to enterprise software, healthcare, or other industries where experience and relationships really matter. Sometimes you just need domain expertise
- Content creators
- Why: They’re already creating. So instead of creating videos, maybe the same skills can go into creating software. Plus, they have distribution. They know what their followers care about, how to get their attention, and how to reach them without paying for ads. In the past, turning that audience into a software product meant finding a technical cofounder or hiring a team. Now a creator could build and launch something themselves, and immediately put it in front of millions of potential users.
- Why not: Having followers helps with a spike of distribution, but building a sustainable growth engine is something else. The most valuable products aren’t memes – they are long-running, long-growing products that need to be endlessly tweaked and iterated on. Does the DNA work?
… and we could go on.
I think we’ll most certainly see a rapid expansion in the types of founder archetypes building new products. That’s a good thing. We’ll see high failure rates, inevitably, but some of them will work. Some of the archetypes – like kids/high schoolers – have some huge advantages but lack domain expertise. The archetypes with lots of domain expertise, like dentists building AI dentist software, have lots of experience but might lack an outsider’s disruptive mindset. There’s pros and cons to each, but building a bigger tent in the founder community can only be a good thing.
Different archetypes are also successful at any given time because they tap into each era’s unique technology and distribution as well.
The “yes” archetypes and “no” archetypes
Let’s look at some of the historical examples of past archetypes that make investors say “yes.” Each startup wave produces a new highly desirable archetype that gets hot, until the next one hits:
- After Google, it was Stanford PhDs
- Facebook: Dropouts building Web 2.0 social apps for their friends
- Airbnb: Designery hipsters building beautiful mobile experiences
- Uber: Gritty, highly operational founders creating on-demand mobile apps
(And of course maybe we’re back to compsci PhDs in the AI infra age)
In contrast, there’s also an extensive “no” list — a lot of the common wisdom would have you avoid teams like these:
- No solo founders
- Avoid non-technical founders
- Techies disrupting hotels is fine, but no to hoteliers building tech!
- Skeptical on international founders, but depends on region/category
- Married couples?
- No dentists, content creators, celebrities, etc…
We could make a big list. But shouldn’t a world-changing technology like AI change some of these? But what if some of these end up being all wrong? What if AI unlocks some of the archetypes that previously were disadvantaged at building products, but now they might thrive? This gives us the opportunity to revisit a bunch of these.
You might look at the list above and also ask, is any validity to them? The archetypes function at multiple levels I think:
- The obvious thing: If you think social apps/marketplaces/on-demand/AI will be a venture scale product category with many winners, then you might look at the leading one, ascribe some of the success to the backgrounds of the founders, and look for more like them. Maybe everyone from that demographic has similar advantages
- Less obvious: Further, each founders’ opportunity is unlocked by the underlying technology cycle and distribution channels. In Web 2.0, if social apps distributed via viral email invites are a thing, then nothing else is better than getting high social people (like college students) with .edu emails emailing each other. If the editorial picks for the Apple App Store are important, then well-connected designery app developers are ahead. The iPhone unlocked GPS/maps/etc which then unlocks on-demand, and it turns out those
- Even less obvious: If all the investors all sorta agree that a founder for a given age should look a certain way, then every investment of that type is safer in a self-reinforcing way. Every investment you make is likely to attract more dollars and the founder may have multiple “unfair” rounds given to them even when things aren’t quite working out
tldr; yes they might have real insights and advantages but there’s also funny self-reinforcing effects that can help. Particularly important when it comes to pre-seed/seed where rounds are often fragmented where many people have to say yes for a bunch of small checks to come together.
The next archetypes
So where does that leave us? I think the interesting question isn’t which of these new archetypes will work. It’s which of the old assumptions about founders were actually fundamental, versus just consequences of the technology and distribution of the time.
Some of the old rules will survive. Coding might get easier while sales, recruiting, judgment, and persistence don’t. Domain expertise might help you find problems but make it harder to rethink an industry from scratch. A solo founder might be able to do the work of ten people, but a team of three might be able to do the work of thirty.
But some of the rules are almost certainly going away. And that means people who would have looked like unusual or even bad founder profiles five years ago might suddenly have real advantages. The mistake would be to replace the old pattern matching with a new version: “solo founders are good now,” “domain experts are good now,” “creators are good now.” The point is that when the underlying technology changes this much, the founder profiles that work should change too.
