[LarsDu88]

One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.

It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines.

That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort of proprietary format.

Many companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Google could sustain a dramatically lower headcount if they started from scratch and never went outside the confines of their network monopoly markets.

From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.

In fact a close example already exists -- Minecraft was very close to being a single person unicorn.

If we have a one person unicorn, I'd imagine it'd be something more like Minecraft than someones newsletter or Google!

[jlarocco]

> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time.

There are still plenty of areas where this isn't true. Or where the free versions are so far behind it may as well be true.

I work on CAD software that integrates with Catia, NX, and Creo, and the pro CAD software is light years ahead of the free alternatives. And even if the free stuff catches up, there's practically zero chance the biggest users will switch from what they're currently using. CAD lock-in is tricky. A lot of times the different CAD systems target different niches, so it's not just file format lock-in, but that a certain CAD system is better for making planes, or designing for CNC, or whatever. And most companies have automation that integrates with their particular CAD system. And the parts have to be read by newer software for decades and produce identical results, or they won't fit together right.

Some of the vendors release free versions, but they're not open source, and they're only there to steer people towards the paid versions later on.

[Alex3917]

> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.

To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Is this really true, though? Having a one-person unicorn doesn't preclude having multi-person company competitors. They might have found competitive axes where having multiple actual humans is an advantage.

[m463]

> arbitrage opportunity

I kind of wonder if something like this will come along for non-enshittified hardware and software.

I keep seeing most companies "getting on the bandwagon", such as printer companies locking their ink refills, hdtv companies collecting viewer and viewing data, and cellphones getting between you and the device you own in just about every way possible.

I can hope.

[tikhonj]

There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever become household names because they're not driven to grow and build a monopoly at all costs, they're driven to build and sell very specific software to very specific organizations.

[iroddis]

The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-disk columnar database. I don’t know if it counts as being commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to learn the language is still quite high.

[wslh]

This, and I'd add that if you're fortunate enough to have the resources to pursue an idea, use that time to your advantage. Don't rush: build it at your own pace. Time can be a real competitive edge compared to startups that are under pressure to sprint toward unicorn status. Network and build.

[pphysch]

Building a global network requires not just building a successful product, but exporting that product to different geographic markets & cultures. Core product team might be 1 AI enabled developer, but what about all the other dimensions of a successful global enterprise?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time

Technically. The reality is much closer to "Any piece of valuable software will get a crappy free version after some amount of time, and multiple paid copies"

[amelius]

Missing the feature of being free (as in libre) makes most paid-for software actually crappy in comparison.

But maybe other things matter more to you, that is possible of course.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Which of course begs the question: which definition of free was being used in the comment I responded to?

[LarsDu88]

Most free versions of things are not as good as paid.

But it doesn't matter for many areas. Sometimes the free stuff will get better than the common paid one (linux and blender come to mind). Sometimes it takes time (Blender), but if the value is there commoditization will happen

[pryelluw]

Minecraft? Not at all. Please stop rewriting history. Minecraft definitely had a small dev team but it wasn’t a single persons effort and wasn’t close to being one. You don’t create a world changing video game by yourself.

[OkayPhysicist]

Minecraft swung past the $10 million in sales mark, and was well on it's way to the $100 million mark, when he hired his first employee. It's not impossible that it would have hit a valuation of $1 billion without hiring on additional employees.

[dandellion]

I bought the alpha for 10 euro when it was just one dude posting on a forum and I can tell you it was very much already Minecraft and going viral.

[bspammer]

I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.

[bspammer]

Found this thread from around that time, it's fun to read now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289

[hartator]

Wasn’t 100% of the code directly written by Notch until 1-year before acquisition?

[ohdeargodno]

No. Jeb was the main developer from 2011 onwards, the moment Minecraft left alpha. Unless there's a time hole I'm not aware of that swallowed 2011, 2012, 2013 and most of 2014, Notch is pretty much only responsible for the very base of the game.

In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.

[OtherShrezzing]

Mojang had 20+ employees way back in 2012, and they were outsourcing platform ports to other dev companies.

[ngokevin]

Stardew Valley?

[ohdeargodno]

If you're going to forget that his girlfriend worked two jobs for 5 years to even support him being able to do that, yeah, he was "alone". Just like trust fund startup bros make it "alone" (with the 500k their parents gave them).

[bko]

Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6 figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with it.

[ohdeargodno]

>Couldn't ever do it alone without having someone (that loves him) sacrificing so much for him.

>Yes this counts as "alone"

I don't even know what to say to that, I guess we're just straight up redefining words to make yourself feel good?

[preommr]

I am curious which of the following (if any) you would define as alone:

1) one person but they take VC funding

2) one person but they use open source solutions

3) one person but they live with their parents

4) one person that lives completely off of what they earned themselves previously, but they did get government funded student loans that let them make money in the first place.

[dlivingston]

You're making some meta-point about "aloneness" where it's disqualified if they have some pre-existing threshold of wealth or connections. I disagree that's disqualifying, especially because you can play that game all the way to the bottom.

Q: was only a single person instrumental to the creation of (product/service)?

A: if yes, then yes; if not, then no. "Yes, but... [help from family / existing wealth / ...]". Irrelevant to me.

[aakkaakk]

And some go broke 4 times even with a billion from their parents. And still claims a win!

[hoppp]

Lucky people. Most parents dont have 6 figures to give tho

[bko]

Most as in < 50%, sure. However a lot of parents do.

> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.

If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.

https://smartasset.com/data-studies/net-worth-states-2025

[throwawaylaptop]

That's just semantics. I worked as a car salesman, saved over $250k, and quit to become a self taught saas guy and my php jquery mess now supports me.

Did I do it alone? You'd argue that no, I had my old bosses help or something because he gave me the funds to learn and work on it?

If he got it from parents instead would that change anything? What about getting it from his own savings?

[LarsDu88]

This still counts as alone in the same way we don't consider Steve Jobs parents renting out their garage or Bill Gates mom bringing him into IBM boardroom executive meetings at the age of 12

[sunrunner]

And to keep the thread going, Undertale (Toby Fox)?

[danaris]

Undertale not only credits Temmie Chang, it has characters based on her in the game.

(There may be others credited; Temmie's the only one I can think of off the top of my head.)

[h2zizzle]

Also not so sure that it's a billion-dollar game.

It's certainly made a ton of money, and has generated multiples worth of that in fan content, but that's partly because Fox has been so liberal with policing trademarks/copyright.

[zepolen]

Well actually....

[ohdeargodno]

No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porsér and soon after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.

No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.

[sunrunner]

How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed? It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".

I'm thinking about https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-Classic as the Ur-Minecraft.

Edit: Added the missing words

[ohdeargodno]

> at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".

When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...

A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.

[bspammer]

Minecraft was already wildly successful before a second employee was brought on board. As someone who was a teenager at the time, I can tell you that from 2009-2010 my friends and I talked about little else. None of the later updates fundamentally improved on that magic, they just added more content.

Here's a hacker news comment from Sept 2010 which talks about Minecraft's success in the past tense, and according to wikipedia that's the same month that Mojang's second employee was hired. It had already gone viral.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742163

[sunrunner]

Chris Sawyer has entered the chat[1]

[1] Conveniently ignoring the contributions to graphics and music of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble, but still...