Steelman · slot A
The weekend-launch case
A solo founder who's actually shipped would argue —I lived the old math: months sketching, mocking, lawyering, and burning capital before a single customer touched the product. That moat is gone. Last weekend I drafted an operating agreement, stress-tested a financial model, generated a brand system, and stood up a working prototype — the equivalent of a small team's two-month sprint, done by Sunday night. The formation data backs it up: 580,612 new businesses in March alone, up 14% year-over-year, and solo founders went from under a quarter of starts in 2019 to over a third by mid-2025. The bottleneck was never the ideas. It was the cost of getting them off the page, and that cost just collapsed.