Welcome to 20 Years Ago

Sam Altman says working on multiple projects can make sense. Dario Amodei predicts a billion-dollar company run by one person. My reaction? Welcome to 20 years ago.

For 20 years, I have been building and launching multiple products. And for much of that time, the advice I kept hearing was the opposite: pick one product. Focus. Find a co-founder.

Now the conversation is full of excitement about solo founders and people who can build more than one thing. Apparently, what used to sound like a problem with my approach has started to sound like the future.

I’ll admit it: that feels good. I had it right all along.

The advice has a qualification

In a shared clip of Altman discussing focus, he makes room for working on several projects while you discover what fits, then committing to the strongest one. He made a similar argument in Y Combinator’s November 2018 interview: exploration means trying projects that may fail, and commitment requires honesty about what is actually working.

That is more specific than saying everyone should launch several products forever. Fair enough. My own approach goes further: I want room to keep building a portfolio.

What resonates with me is the permission to find out through doing. Why would I assume I know which idea deserves everything before I have put it into the world? Building and launching gives me something concrete to judge. Advice alone cannot do that.

The billion-dollar solo founder

Then there is Ben Sherry’s May 23, 2025 article in Inc. about Dario Amodei’s prediction that AI could make a one-person billion-dollar company possible in 2026. Amodei later qualified his confidence at the conference, putting the odds at 70 to 80 percent. It was a prediction, not a company he was announcing.

The billion-dollar number makes a good headline. For me, the interesting part is that building alone is now being discussed as a serious possibility at that scale.

I have been working this way without needing a billion-dollar outcome to justify it. I like building products. I like being able to decide what to make, try it, learn from it, and move. I have been doing that for two decades.

AI makes the work faster and gives one person more capacity. I feel that in my own projects. But I did not need AI to discover that I wanted to build multiple products, or that working solo could suit me.

I should have trusted my judgment

The part that bothers me is how easily repeated advice can make you doubt something you already know about yourself.

A few years ago, against my better judgment, I decided to find a co-founder. It was the biggest mistake of my life.

That is the subject of another post.

For this one, the lesson is personal: I should have given my own experience more weight. Twenty years of building things ought to count for something when deciding how I want to work.

The projects I share here on Felipe.ai are part of that continuing practice. I build, I launch, and I keep learning. There is room for more than one product in that life.

So yes, I’m happy to hear people talk about multiple projects and solo founders with a little more imagination.

Welcome to 20 years ago. I’ve been here a while.