—By Marco Ryan, digital advisor and former Chief Digital Officer at BP and Cyber Leader in Residence at Lancaster University Management School—
AI has upended the traditional startup playbook, making scale and technical teams less relevant than speed, judgement, and domain expertise. In this new landscape, solo founders are moving faster than venture-backed rivals. Marco Ryan explores how this shift is redrawing the boundaries of innovation and competitiveness.
The received wisdom about launching a tech venture used to follow a predictable sequence: assemble a technical team, raise significant capital, build for months in stealth mode, then emerge with a polished product. This model dominated Silicon Valley thinking for decades because the alternatives simply weren’t viable. Building technology required specialists, and specialists were expensive.
That fundamental constraint has disappeared almost overnight. Today, a single founder with domain expertise can move from concept to paying customers faster than a well-funded team following traditional playbooks. The implications extend far beyond startups and are reshaping how we think about competitive advantage across every sector.
Alan Edwards exemplifies this shift. A financial advisory veteran with no coding background, Edwards identified a gap in Bitcoin treasury consulting that established players were ignoring. Rather than spending months assembling a technical team or crafting investor presentations, he used readily available AI tools to build a working solution for Evoke Solutions. Within eight weeks, he had signed paying clients.
His approach, what some now call “vibe coding”, bypassed every traditional gate with no technical co-founder, no seed round, and no months of development cycles. Instead, it focused on market demand combined with enough digital curiosity to experiment with tools that would have been inaccessible to non-technical founders just two years ago.
Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44, is another example. He sold his six-month-old AI startup to Wix for $80 million in June 2025. Shlomo bootstrapped the company with just $10K-20K, had no full-time team, and used tools like Cursor as his development environment.
The statistics tell the same story. Solo-founded startups have risen from 22.2% in 2015 to 38% in 2024, and nearly 19% of early-stage AI startup funding rounds in 2025 went to solo founders.
What we are witnessing, then, is domain experts discovering they can solve customer problems directly rather than describing those problems to engineers who may or may not grasp the nuances. The bottleneck has shifted from “can we build this?” to “should we build this?”, a question that requires business judgement, not programming skills.
The Judgement Premium
This transformation reveals something profound about value creation in the AI era. When building becomes trivial, the scarce resource becomes knowing what to build. More precisely, it is knowing what not to build, when to change direction, when to pause and when to abandon an approach that feels promising but serves no real need.
Until recently traditional startup metrics like team size, funding rounds, and technical complexity focus on inputs. But when a solo founder can validate a business model faster than a well-funded team can finish hiring, those input-based metrics no longer reflect actual progress. Speed matters, but only when directed by informed judgement about market reality.
The most successful new ventures are emerging from founders who combine deep domain knowledge with what I call digital intelligence; the ability to interrogate AI outputs, recognise their limitations, and maintain human oversight of automated processes. These founders do not necessarily understand machine learning algorithms, but they understand their customers well enough to spot when an AI-generated solution misses the mark.
The difference is this: technical skill helps you build faster, but digital intelligence helps you build the right thing.
The Great Levelling for SMEs
For established small and medium enterprises, this shift represents the first genuine competitive reset in decades. The emergence of agentic AI, systems that can autonomously handle complex, multi-step business processes means sophisticated automation is no longer the preserve of large corporations.
Eneco, serving 1.5 million customers in Belgium, deployed a new AI agent using no-code tools in just three months that now manages 24,000 chats per month, a 140% increase over their previous solution – while resolving 70% more customer conversations without human handoff. BDO Colombia used Microsoft’s Copilot Studio to develop an agent that reduced operational workload by 50% and optimised 78% of internal processes.
These are not technology companies but rather traditional businesses that recognised an opportunity to operate more intelligently. The barrier to entry for sophisticated capabilities has collapsed, but the advantage goes to organisations that can implement these tools thoughtfully rather than simply adopting them because they exist.
What has changed is the economic logic. Being small now means being unencumbered by legacy systems and established processes that can slow adaptation. The question for established firms is no longer “can we afford advanced technology?” but rather “what prevents us from using it effectively?” Often, the honest answer is organisational inertia rather than resource constraints.
Investment Capital Follows Signal, Not Structure
Early-stage investors are adapting their evaluation criteria accordingly. The old signals such as team composition, pitch polish, addressable market slides no longer predict success when a solo founder can prove traction faster than a traditional team can build consensus.
Smart money is asking different questions: Has this founder shown that they understand their market? Have they done something that could not have been done six months ago? Can they articulate what they are building and why conventional approaches have failed to address this problem before?
Due diligence still has its place, but the old signals simply no longer predict success. A solo founder who has validated a business model in six weeks provides stronger evidence of future potential than a well-credentialed team that has spent six months in stealth mode.
According to Capterra’s 2025 Tech Trends Survey, 31% of small businesses are prioritising investments in AI next year, but investors want to see evidence of digital intelligence: the ability to question outputs, recognise when systems are misleading, and maintain accountability for automated decisions.
The most telling question investors now ask isn’t “how big is your addressable market?” but rather focused on “what would convince you that you are wrong, and how quickly could you find out?”
The Curiosity Imperative
What separates successful founders in this environment is less about technical sophistication than sustained intellectual curiosity. The ability to ask “what if I am wrong?” and design experiments that could prove it. The discipline to question outputs that confirm existing assumptions while investigating those that challenge them.
This represents a fundamental shift in how we think about entrepreneurial skill. The traditional startup founder was often celebrated for unwavering conviction, that is, the ability to maintain vision despite setbacks. But today’s most effective founders demonstrate structured doubt. They build quickly, but they are equally quick to abandon approaches that are not working.
Shlomo’s approach is a perfect example. He launched early with an imperfect product, shipped constantly (13 times a day in early weeks), and wrote content that built trust rather than directly selling his platform. The raw speed of iteration, combined with genuine engagement with user feedback, created a viral learning loop that no amount of upfront planning could match.
For established business leaders, this same curiosity becomes essential for navigating an environment where competitive advantages can emerge or disappear within months. The question isn’t whether to engage with AI tools but how to maintain enough scepticism to use them well.
Beyond Permission-Seeking
Perhaps the most significant change is cultural. The new model requires no permissions, from investors, technical gatekeepers, or market incumbents who may be slow to recognise emerging opportunities. Rather, it requires judgement, which is developed through experimentation rather than planning.
This creates both opportunity and responsibility. When the barriers to testing ideas have effectively disappeared, the quality of those ideas becomes paramount. The risk is not moving too slowly but building the wrong thing very quickly and convincing yourself it is right because it was easy to create.
The organisations that thrive in this environment will be those that combine rapid experimentation with rigorous evaluation. They will measure success not by what they can build, but by what they choose not to build. In a world where almost anything is possible, wisdom lies in recognising what is actually worthwhile.
The traditional startup is dead. What emerges in its place will be defined not by structure or scale, but by the quality of judgement that guides rapid, repeated experiments with reality. The future belongs to those curious enough to question their own assumptions and disciplined enough to act on what they discover.
Marco Ryan is an experienced Non-Executive Director, digital advisor and former Chief Digital Officer at BP. He is Cyber Leader in Residence at Lancaster University Management School and teaches on its Cyber Executive MBA. His latest book, Rewire or Retire, helps board members and senior leaders understand the impact of AI on leadership, offering clear strategies for adapting in an age of rapid digital change.