The One-Person Unicorn: Engineering the Future of Scalable Entrepreneurship | DC Fintech Week 2025

All right, every All right, everyone. We're going to get going here with our uh final panel of the day. um the oneperson unicorn engineering the future of scalable entrepreneurship and you know once it took entire teams even whole companies to build at scale but could one person powered by AI and blockchain do it all uh you know who needs a co-founder when your AI already disagrees with you um and you know to wrap up today's program please join me in welcoming our moderator for the final panel Julia Shapiro, business and tech reporter at the Hill. Uh Julia and the panelists will explore whether Agentic AI and decentralized infrastructure are paving the way for the age of the oneperson unicorn. And with that, I will turn it over to Julia and our panelists to introduce themselves.

Uh thank you both for being here. Um I guess do we want to start with do you both want to introduce yourselves and a bit about your background?

Sure. Hey everyone, my name is John. I uh run the engineering team at the Salana Foundation and over the last three and a half years I've spent a lot of time working with uh startups and companies of basically every size from Stripe all the way to you know two we're talking about one person unicorns but I I've effectively seen twoerson protocol teams thinking about their products their businesses understanding where blockchain fits doesn't fit and making sure they're successful. Uh, hi everyone. Brian Whitehurst, chief of staff and global head of regulatories affairs at Liberty City Ventures.

We are a web 3 investment uh VC with about 2 billion in AUM. Uh, 70 different portfolio companies, none, just a single founder. Um, been there for about four years. Prior to that, I was a uh at the New York Attorney General's office doing securities and commodities fraud litigation.

Awesome. Well, John, starting with you, um, from a technical standpoint, how close are we to someone being able to launch a business that could eventually scale to a billion dollar valuation and what role does AI and decentralized infrastructure play in all that?

Uh, it's a pretty complex question. Um, but I will say, you know, we've seen examples of individuals doing a tremendous amount of things with protocol-based uh products, right? Um there was uh someone who built this thing. They called it the electronic cash system. It was one person and now it's worth trillions of dollars.

You might have heard of it. It's called Bitcoin, right? And is that a business? you know, maybe debatable and maybe that's maybe that's not the the right lens, but the point is the way that I see things like crypto and blockchain technologies feeding into this is to think about the protocolization of what it is that is the economic loop of whatever is happening because that's ultimately the hard one of the harder things. Think about a traditional company, 30, 50 people, whoever it is, you're spending a lot of time making that machinery work.

And if you can have some of that on chain and you can find a way to properly incentivize like a network of participants, what you get is growth in a way that you cannot do when you need to hire. To me, a lot of the cost of startups and of businesses is not just the fact that you need product market fit, but that you have to coordinate that vision across 30 to 50 individual minds. And that is where things start to break apart and does not scale to these high levels of uh high level of numbers. We've seen great examples of small teams um and but I think that they tend to be rare. I think what we will see with protocol-based teams is that they'll be able to get to that economic capability very quickly.

I'll talk more about like the capital formation stuff later, but I think like that's at least the first part is coordination as overhead is really really tough. crypto and blockchains help align those incentives. And on the AI side of it, it basically says, look, there's capabilities that you can create individual roles to do it. Now, is it perfect? We're not there today, for sure.

Like, we still have a lot of work to do there, but the capability to be able to represent an entire team that previously took a lot of coordination, I think, is definitely very close. And I think we'll see a lot more one, two, three person teams that are just executing really well.

Yeah,

definitely. And Brian, coming from the v venture capital space, how do you evaluate u startups that are AI heavy and light on people uh like a a potential oneperson unicorn? And is that a plus or is that maybe a cons more concerning factor for you?

Yeah, I mean you you still don't really see any oneperson uh VC or companies out there at this point in time. Not going to lie, the uh Bitcoin example really threw me off because it's like, all right, cool. Now that they completely debunked everything that I had. Um, but it's it's really about how you're utilizing that AI and what teams are doing. Are they using it for just reduction of headcount to save money?

Is that always the best approach? I would probably say no. It just depends on what you're working on. But if you're leveraging it in a way to increase scalability, to meet market demands, to find ways to do things that you would not be able to normally do or you would have to hire a lot of people to bring in, that is definitely a an an added bonus. I think still going back I would be skeptical if it's overutilized at this point in time.

There are still um a lot of issues around AI. It's it's great. The functionality of it does it everyone uses it. I use it all the time. Um but to be able to implement it for the business at the scale that's needed to invest in the area areas where we invest is just not feasible at this point in time that I would imagine.

Yeah. And John, you know, focusing on the role of blockchain and decentralized infrastructure, what are some recent or you know, current developments that would enable uh a one person unicorn or a business that could continue to scale?

Yeah, I think the most obvious one is capital formation. Um the fastest growing company and Y Combinator is not AI, it's crypto, right? Um, Axiom is one of the fastest to 100 million200 million dollars of revenue and that's because they're able to again fit into this protocolized world where they immediately join a a network of an ecosystem of things happening instead of having to create that for themselves, right? Um, one of the fastest growing companies in history, period, is Pumped Out Fun. Now, you're going to laugh.

Okay, this is a memecoin thing, but guess what? They're making a lot of money. it's a business even if you don't particularly like what they're doing, right? So, um I think that these mechanics, what I'm getting at, those teams are very small. They're like two maybe 10 people.

They're probably much larger now because they're more capitalized, but I think that what it allows you to do is that it helps you to to your point, I think, is around getting to product market fit. You want to get that very quickly. These were not there these companies first tries at these products. These were the seventh, 8th, ninth try, but when it hit, it hit huge. And when that happens, then they can actually really dive in figure out how to build a better product and a business.

Um, and so when I think about um that component, like when we we call this internet capital markets, if your company, for lack of a better term, can go public on the internet and you can access this global capital pool. That's a very different world than the traditional like, hey, I'm going to grind for like four years and then maybe I'll get a liquidity event. Uh, but there's an economic downturn. Listing a company to go public costs tens of million dollar of dollars or I don't have the right investor connections. All of that kind of goes away when you have the internet at your hands.

So I think capital formation is is the first piece. The second piece I do think is the ability to use tokens to bootstrap network effects. This is one of the hardest and and biggest cost centers for a lot of companies today is distribution and finding a way to get their community aligned with the goals of whatever they're building. We have seen social media platforms do this really well through word of mouth, but today if you were trying to take on a Reddit or an Instagram or something like that, it'd be really really tough to move it um for a lot of different reasons. But if you can find a way to get uh early folks to be able to contribute to that community and then earn upside in participating in it, that I think is the unique ownership capability that will end up hopefully being able to provide contenders.

just I mean from as you were saying that like I think that is an important part of building building your company building your brand but obviously that takes the human intera interaction I mean like I will scan Twitter or Instagram or whatever and it's like I can see the clear delineation between what is usually AI and what is generated versus what is human generated so as you're building your brand like and this is a question back to you like how does you don't want to give too much responsibility to the AI because you want to create that personal connection so how would you approach approach to that as a developer.

It's a it's a great question. I think the founder touch like founder mode is a real thing. You know, it was kind of a meme, but I think the idea of a founder being able to tell that vision is the most important part of any product. It doesn't even have to exist. As long as you can create a vision that you're like, "Yeah, that sounds cool.

I want to do that." That's the most important part. And AI is not going to get there. But what I do think AI is for is for the other 95% of what you mentioned earlier which is okay the hardest part about getting to product market fit is being able to iterate on enough ideas and when you get to there realize actually I don't need half of my company and the being able to nimblely attack these things and if that means that you now have to have that really hard conversation with 25 people who depend on you that's tough but again you're not at the point yet where you need to get there but I I think you're right the founder part of it. You cannot you can't manufacture that touch, but there's a lot of other parts that I think you can um at the point before you get to product market fit.

Yeah. Uh Brian, from a regulatory perspective, what sorts of, you know, regulation and compliance issues come up with the emergence of these tools? Um you know, blockchain tools, um AI agents, what are what are you thinking about there? um risks that come up everything to be fair any business even without AI has regulatory risks across every spectrum but I mean if you use chat GPT or or a claude or rock or whatever especially chat GPT you'll often find like at the very beginning your answer of your question will be like that's an excellent question let me and it's like a repeated thing and it's like okay so it's always giving you the feedback that you want to hear and you have to prompt it in the way to make it give you the feedback that you need to hear completely different. So I think the one of the biggest risks in what we look at actually we're really trying to find good companies in the space in the AI space that are are dealing with the inference and the validation that validation space of what data is coming in is it good data is it actual real data because that is very important from what a founder would is going to need when they're building this out if they are bringing in bad data and relying on that and they're trying to build their business around it a whole host risks across everything across KYC AML across potent in this space securities laws um data privacy everything that you can think of there are issues that would be going on if you're starting at that minimal point I mean beyond that I think globally uh obviously like things like data privacy are a huge issue if you look at GDPR if you touch anything coming out of Europe you're going to qualify under GD GDPR so any like hits from the system like a lot of founders won't realize like oh I'm sending X information here it's in the cloud or whatever not a big deal it is you now fall under that you have a whole regulatory regime so there there are issues like that that constantly need to be evaluated which coming back to the original point of would I invest or like want to do this or look at companies that are thin on people but utilizing AI I would say no at this point because you're just going to have to outsource a lot of that information.

You're going to have to be paying huge legal fees to law firms to make sure that they're uh what you're doing is actually right, things like that. So, I the risks are very very high relying on it. Um but again, those are normal risks that you would get with any business.

I I also think it would just be very lonely. Being the founder journey is not easy and sometimes you need someone else to take down with you. So it's like useful to have someone else to like share that burden.

Yeah. I mean and and we look at team culture from the beginning like if usually with co-founders it is like how are you interacting with your other founder? How are you interacting with your seuite? Have you built a team before? Those are important things that are building blocks about what is going to be a successful business that you believe is going to have a good exit and bring your return that you're looking at from a VC standpoint.

So I think if you're just someone like interacting with an AI changes the equation quite a bit

as they're start as folks you know especially startups are starting to incorporate those tools I guess do you have any advice um or things that you would maybe look out for from a regulatory standpoint?

I mean again it it depends on which area that you're employing that or instituting that AI. We push all of our companies right now in our portfolio to start integrating AI in some way, shape, or form. You just have to. But again, like I would not rely on them to do certain legal functions at this point in time. I wouldn't rely on them to be the sole source of like your KYC AML.

There's too many intricacies there that need to be have human eyes on them to help gauge it through. Um, but to be fair, I would say the same thing to someone that is not necessarily like employing AI, a founder that has a small team, I would be telling them to do the exact same things. You need to get even if it's a fractional person having eyes on this, definitely look out for these types of uh risks across, you know, data privacy, securities laws, legal frameworks, things of the sort. I think on the engineering side, um, the the lens I would take to something like that is there's definitely a difference between vibe coding and vibe engineering. Vibe coding is like, I don't know anything that's happening and I'm just willing this thing to to occur.

I'm just going to keep pressing enter. Please fix, please fix, please fix. And then you ship whatever comes out of that, right? And that is, to be clear, like pretty dangerous in a lot of cases. We've seen products do this and guess what?

they just leak all of the driver's licenses of all their users on the internet. That's not a good thing, right? Um, on the flip side, to your point, if you can get that core team and give them superpowers with AI, that's the vibe engineering, that's where I think you start to see that uh that payoff really well. And you can 100x the the capability of your team. uh today like I I look at a lot of these companies that are super bloated and I could say look you could take the 10 like the senior people figure it out and give them these tools and they'd be able to operate at way way way higher scale.

Yeah, I would definitely say like engineering aspect and you can greatly reduce your engineering teams but you still have to have that core functionality that is really experts in that area.

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess as you know this these uh tools allow companies to have smaller headcounts you know do you think that that democratizes entrepreneurship or is that consolidating power in in a few people

forced entrepreneurship because you get fired. Um I think my so my hope this maybe only slightly related to the question is my hope is we can get to a future where anybody who is building a business has every tool that they need to succeed and they don't have to be a crazy big company. They don't have to raise a bunch of venture capital money. Sorry. Um they don't have to do all of these things.

Create a dad. Um, I think they should be able to do that with as like the minimal amount of people that are needed to uh uh see that vision come to fruition, right? Um, and I think and my hope is that with things like blockchain technologies that you can get access to all those opportunities, you can handle all of your economic coordination and you don't have to have this massive company that again takes a lot of time to move around. That's the strategy we've seen today for a lot of companies out in the world. But I'm hoping that we can make a a brand new sort of entrepreneurial class that has all of these tools.

That would be fantastic, right? Like what are we doing here if not to provide the ability for like small to medium-sized businesses the ability to get investments from their the person that loves that coffee shop? Why can't I invest in any of these coffee shops that I go by? But it's easier to register outside the United States than inside the United States. You're the securities person.

I I think that these are huge opportunities to help our communities grow to grow with our communities as well, but it's so hard to do today because the financial rails for all these things are expensive and slow. So, I I do think that this will help push us to a world where people can, like I said, internet capital markets go public on the internet and really be able to do this safely uh up to whatever the regulation is at the time. that we we're not saying you should skip these things, but we want to make it easier and more frictionless. And if AI helps you too, fantastic, right? Because then you don't need to know like every skill of carpenting and stuff like that.

You can like look it up and it roughly tells you what to do. Um, so anyway, that's my vision of the world. Um, and I so I expect to see a lot of these smaller businesses and success does not need to look like, you know, raising a billion dollars. It can just be like, look, me and my four friends can survive on this thing and and live and we just build this thing and that's great, right? Um, that being said, a lot of these technologies will help incumbents that know how to use this uh and take advantage of it and it will definitely streamline them.

They'll definitely continue to entrench themselves. I don't think both of these things are necessarily mutually exclusive, but the thing that we don't focus on enough is the small and mediumsiz businesses. We focus a lot on the enterprise large scale use cases today.

Yeah, I mean I would agree with everything and that that you just said, John, and I there's never going to be a scenario where the big businesses with the access to capital are able to utilize this in the most efficient proper ways and implement new systems and just add more onto it. But it does give these small medium-sized businesses the capability to do more with less. And as it continues to develop, it's just going to allow them to do more with less. The reality is is like a premium membership to most of these the AI agents and everything right now is like a couple hundred dollars a month. If I was a founder starting out, I would definitely make that investment now and start to train those models on what you're building and what you're doing so it can continue to help you and help you.

I don't think there's ever going to be a scenario especially in in this space where like outside money is not needed like because it takes years to get to the point where you are creating revenue driving revenue and running a business without like without overhead or anything of the sort. So you all you're going to need that money coming in and but AI can have definitely help reduce the amount that you need. So the the faster you get it involved, the better off you are and it gives more access to more people to be able to do things.

I'll say one more thing on the decentralized like blockchain part too that I think is incredibly important is you know um there's a difference between uh investing in open infrastructure and closed infrastructure. Um there's a really great piece uh from this I forget her name but the the stellar on the stellar side they're talking about the value of open infrastructure and I think um there is a world where yes you know enterprise uh incumbents uh really invest in this technology if it's open infrastructure the small and medium businesses can also benefit from it but if it's closed infrastructure it's just for themselves we're going back into the sort of payw wallal you know web two vendor garden type thing so I do think the approach to this can help both but we have to be really conscious and advocate continue to advocate paid for open infrastructure.

Mhm.

And I mean like at Liberty City like that was our or one of our driving thesises from the beginning is creating this new financial system that creates a more inclusive uh community that allows people to access the things that they were never able to access before that were cut off at a certain point by regulations and laws that were established almost 100 years ago. So that is the system we're working for. It's great that AI is adding to that. I mean I think if you would have asked anyone in this room 10 years ago where does AI fit in people would have been like cool whatever like not really know chat GBT completely changed that equation it's phenomenal like I think it but there still needs to be steps involved with it but it is really creating that more inclusive uh financial system

definitely and one final question for you both since as we discussed we're we're right before the happy hour don't want to keep folks too long um where What industry or maybe area do you expect to or or think we could first see a a oneperson unicorn?

It's probably going to be financial services.

Does Mr. Beast count as like a content creator?

I mean, he's he opened up has a charter for a bank now. So, like financial services

getting in on all sorts of stuff, but even he has like a gigantic team behind him. But really like a content creator like building a a brand by yourself as a content creator, AI would just completely take streamline that that process.

Yeah, I think if it was someone brand new starting today, Mr. Beast has been around for a while. Um I think it's going to have to be somewhere in the financial area because there's just so much uh uh potential to improve that space. Um and the infrastructure just scales way better. So

see I don't like I would be skeptical of a one person who corner in the financial space like

that's right

I think it's more

it's for me it would be more on the retail side of something um like I said like a content creator um anything that involves too much risk and the downsides I think would give me a lot of pause for thinking that that is going to be successful with the tools right again like 10 years from now maybe quantum computing has taken over to the extent that it could potentially do so and then we're living in a different world but right now like the financial the financial side of things and what comes with creating a financial like entity is a there's a lot there one example that I think is worth looking into is this guy named Levelvels um he basically just uses AI to create individual small companies so instead of one company being the unicorn in totality he has like whatever 10 companies compan that do different things. Maybe that's the future and maybe that works out a little bit better than financial services.

Okay. Um any final closing thoughts that either of you want to add?

No, I mean I think generally like I can't see anyone out there because the lights are super bright. Um, but as you're going through it, I like if you're not already integrating AI in some way and you are a founder, immediately like leave this conference tomorrow, whatever when you get to work, like start figuring out how you can get it in place because I can guarantee you any VC that you go in front of, they're going to want to know or the question is going to come up at some point in time. How are you integrating AI? Like what are you using it to help scale your business and grow it and reduce the headcount? because that is important.

There are a lot of avenues that can that it is very useful and if you're not planning for it now, you're behind it.

I'll give the same pitch for stable coin. It is fintech week. I think if you're in fintech and you're not at least aware of stablecoin right now, every single enterprise needs to know what this is at the very least if not use it. uh when the cost of financial infrastructure goes to zero, when you can have every financial instrument in the world on chain and it's easy to use and they're composable, you get fundamentally new products and new businesses and that's where I think we'll see a lot of innovation. So don't hesitate to ask if you're curious about some of the conversations that we've had um here at the Salana Foundation.

Okay, awesome. I guess we'll we'll wrap it there, but thank you both for joining me.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. So, thank you Julia, John, and Brian for the really insightful discussion. And with that, uh, I would like to give a big thank you to all of our speakers today.

Um, special thank you to Chris Brummer and the FinTech Foundation. This has been an absolutely fantastic conference and a lot of work's gone into it. So, uh, really turned out great. And you know from the foundations of how AI works to governance to entrepreneurship we've seen just how transformative this technology will be for finance and uh we look forward to continuing the discussion uh across fintech week both what's left of it this year and in future years to come. So we now welcome everyone uh to join us uh at the decentralized happy hour presented by city on the first, second and fifth floors.

Thank you everyone.