The most valuable startup employees ("10x joiners") leverage AI to execute at the level of a full team. Instead of looking to hire direct reports, they bring a suite of AI agents and workflows, enabling companies to achieve massive scale with tiny headcounts.

VCs traditionally advise against early product expansion. But with agentic AI, which leverages existing metadata to solve new problems without building new screens, startups can rapidly add capabilities to meet customer demand for a single, unified agent, accelerating the compound startup model.

Platforms like Nebula allow founders to move beyond simple automation. By providing a high-level directive and connecting services, AI agents can run entire business functions, like a content blog that researches, writes, and publishes daily with minimal human intervention.

AI tools have radically lowered business creation barriers, enabling individuals to manage tasks that once required entire teams. This has opened a brief, powerful window of opportunity for lean, AI-native startups to outmaneuver larger incumbents before they fully adapt and integrate the same technologies.

Low-cost AI tools create a new paradigm for entrepreneurship. Instead of the traditional "supervised learning" model where VCs provide a playbook, we see a "reinforcement learning" approach. Countless solo founders act as "agents," rapidly testing ideas without capital, allowing the market to reward what works and disrupting the VC value proposition.

Daniel Miessler argues corporations inherently aim for zero human employees. AI makes this possible, creating a future where a founder can execute their vision by deploying an army of AI agents, effectively making the ideal company a single human supported by AI.

The exponential growth in AI agent capabilities creates a plausible scenario where a single entrepreneur can manage a vast array of automated tasks, from development to operations. This raises the possibility of a "solopreneur" achieving a billion-dollar valuation without a traditional human workforce.

AI is dramatically increasing the capabilities of a single individual, lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship. This technological leverage will enable a massive new wave of solo founders who can build and scale businesses without the need for large teams or significant venture funding.

The most forward-thinking founders are exploring whether AI enables the entire concept of a company to be redefined. The ultimate goal is a 'super-powered individual' who oversees an army of AI bots to handle coding, marketing, sales, and support, creating a billion-dollar outcome with a single human employee.