New Founder Archetypes

This is rarely written about, but there are archetypes of founders and cofounders that work really well. With AI, I think the goalpost has shifted too.

Before, it was a duo or trio of cofounders who were (mostly) Product, Engineering, Design (PED) focused with maybe a mix of business who could build the product alone. Often, there is a core protagonist who drives the whole thing forward by sheer force of will. I wrote about this in this post about investing in engineers about a month and a half ago.

AI has made it cheaper (and easier) to build software and more often I’m now seeing strategies where a team of “full stack“ founders bootstrap or seedstrap to PMF, then think about strategy around raising venture.

What is a full stack founder?

A full-stack founder is someone who can, solo, 1) build and design the entire product and scale it to some reasonable scale (3+ years of hands on engineering experience, ability to scale to 100k-1m users) 2) market and sell it themselves and 3) make logical and good product decisions alone such that they effectively don’t need extra cofounders

The way I think about building companies today, is that you need a team of one or more (not strictly one) full stack founders, without any non-full stack people. This means if someone just does engineering or just does design or just does sales they don’t make the cut. They need to be able to do the whole thing.

This is founders, which is separate from founding teams. I’ve been learning from afar from folks like Julian Weisser at Solo Founders and who I first met in the Boulder startup ecosystem in 2017. Full stack founders then solve for how to scale teams of employees that they manage, while retaining equity and control.

These days, increasingly, I’m seeing non full stack teams fall apart to the degree such that I don’t believe non-full stack people should be cofounders - I think it increases your odds of death dramatically and it’s something to consider if you’re starting a company. None of the product-adjacent BS from bigtech… You need to have built products before and taken them to market. First hand.

Full stack founders are crushing it though, more than ever, and creating outliers that are hard to ignore.