The Myth of the Solo Founder: What Thirty Years of Entrepreneurship Actually Taught Me

By Jason Butcher

Somewhere in my old files, there’s a rough layout for a newsletter I tried to put together right after high school in Vancouver. I called it The Home-Based Journal. It never actually got off the ground, it stayed an idea more than a real publication, but it was the starting point for everything that came after. It’s what steered me into publishing and media in the first place, and that early attempt eventually turned into a string of actual publications I did manage to launch. I also remember, very clearly, how people reacted when I told them what I was trying to build.

“So, you work from home?”

There was always a pause after that question. Not hostile, just… unconvinced. In the early nineties, “home-based business” wasn’t a badge of anything. It was a polite way of saying you couldn’t get a real job, or you weren’t quite ready to be taken seriously. Banks treated it that way. Landlords treated it that way. Even some of my own family treated it that way, in the gentlest possible terms.

I bring this up not out of nostalgia, but because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how completely that perception has flipped, and how little of the actual work has changed underneath it. These days I run Orbit Capital, backing and advising early-stage founders across fintech, AI, and a handful of other sectors. But the person asking these questions is still the same kid who once tried to build something out of nothing at a kitchen table thirty years ago, just with better tools and more grey hair.

The Same Person, A Different Word

Today, if you tell someone you’re a solo founder, you get a different reaction entirely. Interest. Maybe even a little admiration. Solo founder implies discipline, focus, someone who doesn’t need a room full of people to validate an idea before building it. It’s practically aspirational now. Twitter bios are full of it. Accelerators have entire tracks built around it.

Strip away the language, though, and you’re often looking at the same person I was in 1992. Someone working alone, out of a spare room or a kitchen table, building something from nothing, figuring out distribution and cash flow and self-doubt mostly by trial and error. The tools changed. The respect changed. The actual experience of doing it alone, at two in the morning, wondering if any of it will work, has not changed even a little.

So, what did change, really?

Three things, as far as I can tell. First, starting costs dropped to almost nothing. Back then, even getting an idea in front of a few hundred people meant buying equipment and paying for printing and postage. A solo founder today can reach more people before breakfast, for a fraction of the cost. Second, remote and independent work became completely normal, so nobody assumes you’re failing just because you’re not walking into an office. And third, the industry-built infrastructure around being solo. Accelerators, mentor networks, founder communities, tools that used to require a whole department now available to one person with a laptop. None of that existed for someone doing what I was doing. You were genuinely on your own, in every sense of the word.

I’d add a fourth thing now, because it’s the one everyone asks me about lately. AI is going to produce a shift as significant as the internet did, maybe more. It’s already letting one person build what used to take a team of twenty. But here’s what I keep telling founders when they bring it up: software getting smarter doesn’t make relationships less important. If anything, it makes them more valuable, not less. AI can write your code, draft your deck, even help you model your market. It still can’t sit across from you at two in the morning and tell you the truth about whether your idea is worth pursuing. It still can’t make an introduction because it actually believes in you.

That third one, the infrastructure, is the part I keep coming back to, because it points at something the “solo founder” label quietly gets wrong.

Nobody Actually Builds Alone

Here’s the thing I learned the hard way, back when I was trying to get that first newsletter off the ground, and the thing I still believe today: the word “solo” has always been a bit of a lie. Not because founders don’t work independently, they absolutely do, but because the ones who make it are never actually isolated. They just don’t call the people around them a company.

Somewhere along the way I realized founders don’t actually build companies, not at first. They build ecosystems. Customers, advisors, investors, partners, employees, the community around all of it. The company is really just what grows inside that ecosystem, once it’s strong enough to hold something up.

When I started out, my “network” was a handful of other small publishers and printers in Vancouver who traded advice over the phone because none of us could afford to figure everything out from scratch. That was my ecosystem, even though nobody used that word for it back then. It didn’t look impressive. It wasn’t venture-backed. But it was the difference between quitting in month four and still being in business years later.

I’ve never believed networking was about collecting business cards or showing up to the right events. It’s about staying curious enough to keep asking questions, and generous enough to open a door for someone else even when there’s nothing obvious in it for you. Most of what I’ve built has come from exactly that, curiosity that turned into a conversation, that turned into an introduction, that turned into something neither of us expected.

What’s changed is that this kind of support is no longer accidental. You don’t have to stumble into the right phone call the way I did. There are now entire communities built specifically to give a solo founder what used to take years of scattered luck to find, an honest sounding board, an introduction that actually goes somewhere, someone who has already made the mistake you’re about to make and will tell you before you make it. That’s not a small shift. That’s the entire barrier I was up against, engineered away.

I think this is the real story behind the “home-based business to solo founder” shift, and it’s more interesting than a rebrand. It’s not that solo work became more respected because we found a better word for it. It’s that we built the scaffolding to make solo work actually survivable, and the respect followed the results.

Why This Still Matters

I’d be lying if I said this is purely academic for me. Everything I do now at Orbit Capital, backing early founders, sitting in rooms with people building something from almost nothing, comes directly from having been that kid with a newsletter idea that never quite got off the ground.

I’d also be lying if I made it sound like a straight line from there to here. There were years when it wasn’t obvious any of this would work. Projects failed. Revenue disappeared for stretches I didn’t like to think about. I questioned whether I’d made the right decision more times than I can count, usually somewhere around midnight, staring at numbers that weren’t moving in the direction I needed them to. Looking back, those years probably taught me more than any of the wins did. They’re also the reason I take it seriously now when a founder tells me things aren’t going the way they’d hoped. I’ve been there. More than once.

I know what it feels like to have an idea nobody around you quite understands yet. I also know what it feels like when one person, just one, takes you seriously enough to make an introduction or answer a late-night message. Looking back, I think I’ve slowly become the person I wish I’d met when I was twenty, someone willing to answer the questions, make the introduction, and remind a founder they’re not crazy for believing in something that doesn’t exist yet.

That’s the part I try to hold onto as the language keeps evolving. Whatever we end up calling it ten years from now, whatever comes after “solo founder,” the actual need underneath it will be exactly the same as it was when I was piecing that first newsletter idea together at my kitchen table: someone building alone still needs people around them who believe it’s worth building.

If there’s one piece of advice, I’d give someone starting out today with nothing but a laptop and an idea, it’s this: don’t wait as long as I did to ask for help. I spent my first couple of years treating every conversation like a competition, worried that admitting I didn’t know something would make me look unprepared. It took me embarrassingly long to figure out that the founders furthest along weren’t the ones who knew everything, they were the ones who’d asked the most questions, out loud, to people who’d already been through it. Community isn’t a nice-to-have you get to once the business is stable. It’s usually the reason it becomes stable in the first place.

Today I spend most of my time introducing founders to investors, advisors to entrepreneurs, communities to opportunities. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that’s what I’d been trying to do all along, since long before any of it had a name. The publications were never really about printing magazines. Orbit Capital was never really just about investing. The thread running through all of it has always been connecting people. The businesses were simply the vehicle.

Looking back, I realize the purpose has never really changed. From that first Home-Based Journal idea to everything I do today, it’s always been about bringing people together. Companies come and go. Technology changes. Markets evolve. But one founder believing in another has never gone out of style, and I don’t expect it ever will.