She Staffed Her 100k-User Startup With AI Agents | Claire Vo, ChatPRD

25:48Claire Vo:I think people don't know what's going to make them happy. And I think people think that running the playbook and these honestly still outlier stories of success are going to be what make them happy. And so they think if I put myself into this machine, out the other end will spit happy me that has, you know, a billion dollar business. And I think it really, and so they, this is my experience, sacrifice a lot in the interim telling themselves that story. And at the end of the day, that is not actually the source. It's like truly know thyself. and you know I I just spent a lot of time on myself and and observing how other founders did things and observing outcomes of businesses that I really loved and observing my own experience running a startup and I just know what sparks joy and I also know very clearly what I will be thinking about on my deathbed like I just I know that very well and I promise you it will not be the renewal rate of a SaaS business.

26:57Claire Vo:Like that will not be the thing in 50 years or 60 years or seven, you know, I'm, I'm shooting for 120. So many years, I'm just not going to be, I'm not going to be thinking about it. I'm not going to be thinking about run rate then what am I going to be thinking about? And so I really want to build a business that serves me, that serves my kids, that serves my husband, that serves the people that I employ, that I love, that serves a community that I think has given me a lot that I can get back to. And like any, anybody else's idea of what that is supposed to look like is their business, not my business, my business.

27:30Claire Vo:And I just wish more people could get to that point because one of the things that I think is so exciting about this moment in AI is you have a lot of optionality. You don't have to raise venture. If you don't want to, you can raise a lot of venture. If you want to, there's actually the opportunity to commercialize much smaller businesses because the capital required is much lower. And so if you can know what your own personal goals are, you have a lot of options in shaping how you pursue those goals. And I think people don't spend enough time questioning like, what is all this for and why am I doing it?

28:06Claire Vo:And will it really make me happy? Was there a moment or a period that kind of caused you to reflect and think about that? Or was it more of an event, sort of an evolving thing that happened? Or do you feel like you're generally more attuned to that than other people? Well, you know, this is like, this is a, you know, it's a sad story, but I had a colleague that I worked with a long time ago, many, many years ago. And somebody, a member of their family passed away. And I went to the funeral and I counted the number of people that were there from this company. And this company had 500 people at it.

28:38Claire Vo:And I went to this, it was a very sad situation. I went to the funeral and I just didn't see that many people from like 500 plus people. I just didn't see how many people. And I thought, you know what? None of this, like very little of this is going to come back to me in the moments that matter. And so I really thought it is super important for me to optimize how and when I spend my time and who and how I invest in. And I was very sure, I was just very sure of who's going to be there at the end of the day and who's not. And I think there's moments like that, very personal moments, but then just make you reflect on your behaviors at work, where you spend your time, who you work with, who you give, what, why you do things, why you take from people, why you give to people.

29:26Claire Vo:And I think that was a very clarifying moment for me. It was an external moment for me, but it was a very clarifying moment for me to say, really staying anchored in my values and what matters to me is going to cultivate a very happy life. And I will tell you, everybody that I talk to come to me, they're like, Claire, how are you doing? I'm like, I am living my best life. I am happy. I am having fun. I'm spending time on things I find intellectually interesting. I am spending time with people I found intellectually interesting. I have too many kids. It's great. And even, you know, people come like gently knocking on my door.

30:02Claire Vo:They're like, would you ever sell? And I say, look, there may be a 10x multiple on the revenue. and there is a hundred X multiple on my happiness. So, you know, maybe I'll compromise somewhere in the middle there. You know, I'm not stupid. But I do think just being really like two feet on the ground, grounded in what I want, what I care about, what makes me happy, it just makes all that other stuff fall away. You know, you ended on such a happy note, but to go back to sort of funerals and things like that, there was a really affecting piece that maybe came out 10 years ago that just sort of resurfaced on the internet.

30:39It was essentially this idea. I think it was called like go to the funeral. Yep. Oh, yeah. And did you come across? I did see it pop up again. It really, really affected me. But essentially for those who are listening or watching who aren't familiar with this, it's this idea of you should do things not because they are like immediately beneficial or because you feel like you actually have some real debt to go there, but you should do them because they're just the right thing to do. I'm curious how you think about that in your life because it sounds like you were really close to this coworker, but a lot of people didn't go to something like that.

31:24What is it about showing up for people? It sounds like you read that and it resonated with you. So like what's the thing that resonates from you on that sort of thing?

31:34Claire Vo:Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is I wouldn't even claim to have been incredibly close to that person, but I spent eight hours a day around them for three years. Like that is not nothing. And I really do believe that there are some social threads that take effort to maintain, but that are worthwhile and they give to others just as much as you, you get out of it. And so I've always really believed that, you know, there are just moments that you show up for. There are things that you do that like hedonic pursuit is not the highest calling of like human humanity. And so I do believe cultivating a sense of community, immunity, even obligation, even obligation to each other, I think is quite healthy.

32:27Claire Vo:It's something that I want to demonstrate for my children. And I do think a lot of, you know, in 30 or 50 or whatever years, am I going to regret having done this? No. Am I going to regret maybe not doing it? Probably. And so I try to, I try to just zoom out a lot in, in my life and it really helps you identify what's important. I also just think there is this essential humanity that we all start to lose when we interact with each other through phones and or we like stop interacting with each other and we start to talk to chatbots. And I think like staying anchored in your humanity is very important.

33:07Claire Vo:So I try to do it. Can you share a little bit more on that note about how you've manage to build sort of this incredible business. Pretty much, you know, you have some fractional people, but pretty much on your own with AI, right? You're the only full-time person on it. I am the only full-time person. How do you do that? Like, do you think it's a personality thing that sort of lends to it? Do you think some people, there's one founder, he's not bootstrapped. He's raising a lot of money. His name is Ben. He's building a company called Pulsia. And his whole thing is he wants to try and be the only person working on this company for as long as possible, if not forever.

33:41Um, and then a lot of people who saw, listened to the podcast episode with him said, that sounds miserable. I couldn't imagine doing it. You on the other hand, like you, you kind of are doing something similar in the sense that you have mostly it's, it's just you full time. So how, how does that work? How do you think about it? What have you learned from that experience?

34:01Claire Vo:It's funny. People see me on stage and they see the podcast and they're like, Claire, you must be the biggest extrovert. I'm like, I am truly the biggest introvert on the face of the earth. I could be in my home and see no one, but my family for years and be very, very happy. So I do think I'm like actually quite introverted. I do not get my energy from like being amongst people. Um, I, I love, I love people. I love my friends. I love people that I'm around. I, but it's not where I derive energy from. So I do think there's a personality aspect to it. There's also a skill aspect to it as well. I'm just very fluent across a lot of practices.

34:44So I can code.

34:46Claire Vo:I've led product organizations. If you've led product organizations, you're functionally an enterprise salesperson. So I can sell. I can do marketing because I'm doing this podcast and I'm, you know, very eloquent in front of customers. I'm eloquent in front of the market. I can speak on stage. And so I just have the skills to do a lot of things in the business, which means I'm able to get a lot of leverage around AI, whereas somebody who is not as, I would say, well-rounded in their skill set would maybe have a harder time running a business. I mean, the second thing is I have a lot of management experience, and guess what?

35:20Claire Vo:Agents are just management. So the ability to design an org, give jobs to people, give jobs to agents, and figure out the kind of norms and operating model and then you know hold them to account I think that is also a skill that translates really well to kind of like the solo founder life um I know lots of people who it would be absolutely their nightmare to do what I'm doing by myself and and you do have to carry a lot right like if it goes poorly it's on me if it goes well it's it's on me I do sometimes find myself doing like very low level tactical stuff because I like it and so there are you know pitfalls I would say to this model but it fits my personality and my skill set and my lifestyle really well so I think if you're if you're if you have the inclination it's it's definitely possible you know I often ask people why solo found like why are you being a solo founder um you've had co-founders in the past for for your more traditional sort of startups.

36:25But, you know, it seems fairly clear why you wouldn't have a co-founder in something like this, which is both personal and very tied to kind of the life you want to live. But maybe you could share a little bit more about what it's like building this as a solo founder, kind of how you think about like spending your time. I think that a lot of people, you know, if even if you are a generalist or really good at a lot of things, generalist doesn't necessarily imply that you're good at a lot of things, but like you, you have a lot of skills that are wide ranging. Um, it doesn't necessarily mean that, uh, it's easy always to do all the things that are necessary, even with all of the tools.

37:05So I'm curious as a solo founder, kind of what you've learned about building a business solo, uh, and what that, what might be useful there for other people who are listening.

37:15Claire Vo:Well, again, like know thyself. And one of the things that is very clear, having done this for three years, is I am an engineer at heart. I will literally build any feature, any feature on the face of the earth to avoid marketing. A hundred percent. Like write a blog post about this awesome launch we did or launch 10 other things. I will definitely launch 10 other things. And so you do have to really watch your own inclinations to where you want to spike deep. And you have to sort of like build systems that support your special shape as a solo founder. And so I've built this like constellation of nine open claws.

37:54Claire Vo:I have a marketing one. I have an EA. I have who was emailing you that I was late. I have an EA. I have a salesperson. I have a support person. I have a support agent. So I've built this sort of like team around me so that I'm not the single point of failure on moving stuff forward. And then I've organized my day in that I, you know, swallow the frog. I do the stuff that I'm least inclined to naturally do up front and then leave the afternoon for building, which I would build anyway. So I do all my sales calls in the morning. I do all my marketing in the morning. I do all my podcasting work in the morning.

38:29Claire Vo:I kind of like front load all that stuff. And then when I have this free time in the afternoon, I know I'm going to spend it coding. And that's what, that's what I do. And so I do think you have to sort of like know yourself. I also will say, again, I kept this eye on like, where am I resource constrained? And I did hire our first engineer, um, a year into chat purity. And the reason I did this again, very lifestyle aligned is it was fourth, it was two years ago. It was fourth of July weekend. And we went down to Santa Cruz with, I had two kids at the time. Now I have three, I had two kids. and the kids were like playing in the background and I was like dealing with some century, some, some dumb, like open AI outage or some century issue.

39:12Claire Vo:And I was like doing a PR and I just looked at my kid. I was like, this is crazy clear. Like you cannot be sitting on your laptop on 4th of July weekend, pushing PRs because you're the single point of failure on, on engineering. So two days later, I hired the engineer that's working with us today. And so now we have this nice balance, I'd say, of engineering support on the company. And so every point where I felt like, you know, Claire, it's just a little cuckoo that you're spending your time doing this. It was always compared to being able to spend time with my kids. It actually had nothing to do with business.

39:49Claire Vo:That's when I would hire somebody to do something. I know you shared with our mutual friend Lenny how you think about OpenClaw, but maybe if you could give the primer about this. Because a lot of people have different philosophies around using AI, using agents. Some people think that it's better to have one agent that has lots of context across various things. It sounds like you're taking more of the constellation approach. How would you say as a solo founder you've made those decisions? What have you learned? What have you experimented with? So I much, much, much prefer agent identities that represent an employee or represent a function.

40:28Claire Vo:It's how my mental, it's how I've worked in previous companies, right? Like I didn't have one employee that I worked with that, you know, federated out work to everybody else. I had my chief of staff and I had my product managers and I had my engineers and my support team. And I was, I'm able to pretty clearly define what each of those jobs and ideal profile of a, an employee should be. And I just applied that exact same model to my open clause. So instead of making one mega claw, I made nine mini clause. They all have their own identity. They all have their own tools. They all have their own workspaces.

41:05Claire Vo:They all get better at their jobs over time. I give them all individual coaching. Um, and it's just worked better for me operationally. And it's worked better for me, I think technically, because scoping an agent to a job to be done is much easier than building this like all knowing multi-purpose agent that has to navigate your whole business, even if a business is relatively small, like chat purity. So that's been my approach. I think we're going to see, I mean, we've seen this in coding, right? No one said like, why is Devin by cognition? Like why doesn't Devin just do everything? It's Devin's good at coding.

41:39Claire Vo:Devin's Devin's your coding agent. So let's let Devin be good at that. I, I take that same approach to my agents. And then I work on so many different things. I like the mental model of if I'm spinning up a project, I can just spin up an agent for that very specific project, give it a very specific identity and set of tools and let it loose in a constrained space. And it tends to do a very, very good job then because it's well-defined. I think about it the same way I think about employees. Can I tell you what your job is? Can I tell you what success looks like? Like, can I give you the tools that you need to do the job well?

42:13Claire Vo:And do I spend enough time with you that you're getting better over time? And it's much easier for me to do that with individual agents than with, like, the mega agent. I think this is the first time we've gotten a message, multiple messages, from an OpenClaw agent saying that somebody was running late and apologizing on their behalf and offering to reschedule if it made sense. Not putting this as a way to make you feel badly for being late because it was not a problem at all. We were just remarking about how interesting it was to have that happen and how seemingly accurate it was. Also how it was warning us sort of far in advance.

42:52What's actually going on under the hood there? Like just take me through a case study of this because it's essentially I think that we got our first notification from your agent, which is maybe called Polly. And Polly said that maybe it was an hour and a half before. we never get a message that somebody's running late an hour and a half more it was super nice to know right because we were like okay we don't have to we don't have to be exactly on time if we needed to do something else but what's actually going on there how does it how does it work yeah

43:22Claire Vo:i'll walk you through it so polly is my ea um and so she handles scheduling research um pre-meeting briefs so every 15 minutes she's like hey just fyi you're about to go into this podcast and here's who you're meeting with and this is where it is. And so she's sort of like my, my work personal assistant. I also have a family personal assistant named Finley, um, that works for my husband and I. And so Polly to this today looked at my schedule and was like, whoops, I really put you back to back on a really tight schedule across the city. And so as I was parking at meeting number one, I sent Polly a voice note and I said, I'm not sure I'm going to make it to this on time.

44:07Can you let them know?

44:09Claire Vo:And so I think she sent that. I don't even know if she sent that email. What Polly sends is none of my business. So I think she sent an email. And then as I was just like sitting in deadlocked traffic, I sent another telegram note to Polly because I use her through polygons, a voice note because I don't want to type. And I sent a voice note and I said, I am stuck in traffic. It's getting worse. Config is downtown. Apologize. This is when I think I'm going to be there. If they want to reschedule, let me know. I'm super flexible. Just handle it. As my friend Hillary says, it's the yappers API. It just yapped at the model.

44:46Claire Vo:And I think she did a good job. And so Polly has her own email address. She has access to my calendar. She has access, read access to my email. So she has context on what's going on. She has instructions on when she's allowed to send emails and when she's not, and when she has to brief me and when she doesn't. And then she has, you know, again, I've designed her to be very seemingly proactive to me. So every 15 minutes, she checks on what I'm doing next and reminds me who I'm meeting with. Every day, she gives me a morning brief of what's going on. Every afternoon, she and Finley, who's my family agent conspire to make sure that somebody's picking up the kids.

45:27Claire Vo:So it's like, it's like, Hey, Claire, you're going to be downtown and your husband's going to be over here. And the kids are in two different basketball camps. Like, are you very sure somebody's got them? And so we do do a lot of, a lot of that stuff. And then she builds playbooks and all that, you know, that's really interesting. So one thing that, one thing that comes to mind with these, with these agents and and utilize them in this way is um this idea of when an agent is transparently ai versus when something is trying to not be ai and try and act in the background my sort of take on this is that generally people are happy to interact with ai as long as they know that it's ai but they don't like it when something feels like it's maybe not ai or it's maybe ai and there's that ambiguity or it's something that's sloppy and trying to pass off as, because it kind of insults their intelligence.

46:23So I really like the approach of, you know, this is being very open that like, hey, I'm, you know, the AI, the AI agent. I'm curious how this dovetails to chat PRD, which is, you know, or generating anything with AI. One thing that I know your friends, you're also friends with Dan Shipper. One thing that he put out fairly recently was this idea that have AI generate whatever you want it to, but own the actual content that the AI puts out. So if you can't explain or defend whatever is in the generated document by AI, then you're not doing your job as a teammate because you're just sort of like not even proofreading or whatever.

47:08I'm curious how you think about sort of use of AI for generation, use of AI for agents, and sort of that aspect of like human accountability, that sort of thing.

47:18Claire Vo:Yeah, I mean, I think the folks at Linear also have an interesting approach here where you can't assign things to agents. You can only delegate things to agents. It's a very interesting nuance, but essentially same concept. An agent can't own anything. I don't know. I'm going to be a little extreme here. I think agents can own things. Now, ultimately, I'm accountable to the performance of all systems in my business, whether humor or agent. And I think this is where maybe I have the experience and perspective of somebody who has, as I said, held the ultimate pager in organizations. Because I ran large engineering organizations, P0, engineer sleeps through it, its manager has a hard time, guess who's getting paged at 2 in the morning?

48:02Claire Vo:It's me. And so I have seen the failure states of human ownership, and I don't think there's that much difference between the failure states of human ownership and agent ownership. And so I think I'm probably on the spectrum a little bit more willing to delegate, quote unquote, ownership to agents because I think this is where we're going. And maybe ultimately I'm accountable, but that would be the same as if there was a human in the loop versus an agent. so I don't think of them that differently. In terms of transparency of agent versus not, Polly has a signature. It's got the little lobster open claw signature in it.

48:42Claire Vo:So if you know, you know. It's like Polly, Claire's lobster assistant. And so people that know, know what that is. People that maybe don't are like sort of in this ambiguous spot and maybe they don't really care. I do have a sales agent, sorry, chat purity prospects sam um who does all my um replies to all my inbound sets up all my meetings on sales runs pipeline all that kind of stuff people definitely think sam is real um and they show up to me and they're like is sam joining me and i'm like joining i'm like oh i'm sorry sam is not sam is not a human but but because i'm claire how i ai though because i'm building an ai product my customers love that because it's just a demonstration of this sort of like ai first model and ai first way of operating that i think they find sort of like interesting and inspirational as opposed to um devious so i i take that approach the how ai is is really successful i mean you have nearly a hundred thousand subscribers on youtube um i think you have something like 300 videos that's really really impressive like very prolific at the same time you said that if you didn't sort of kind of control for maybe your predisposition or sort of where you would spend your time, you probably wouldn't be doing that.

50:04You'd probably be coding or something, building features. So maybe you could share a little bit more about when you decided to start making that, sort of what was the inspiration behind it, how you think about media and storytelling when it comes to attracting clients and sort of is that more of a thing around building awareness or authority? Or how do you think about that?

50:29Claire Vo:Well, the good news is my best performing podcasts are ones where I am coding. So that is where the intersection - That's validation if there ever was one. Yeah, validation. And so this was a podcast that I launched a little over a year ago with Lenny. And our whole hypothesis was that there was appetite for real hands-on demonstration of AI use. and we started with a lot of interviews of people just using AI in their day-to-day workflows and exploring how they were using different tools and how it was impacting how they did their work or how they lived their life. And it's sort of evolved to be a little bit more balanced.

51:03Claire Vo:It's about half interviews and then half me solo going through specific workflows, looking at models, explaining tools, and just generally demystifying AI for folks. What I love about the podcast, It is actually perfectly in my zone of genius, which is I technically do it alone in my house. So I'm very happy introvert. I get to learn so much because I just talk to interesting people and they show me interesting things that they do with AI. And then I go take it and I use it and I use it in my own code. I use it in my own business. So it is this really great learning experience. And it just creates more visibility for me as a founder.

51:41Claire Vo:It creates more visibility for my product. it creates more visibility for people that I think are doing great things in the market overall. And so it's been a really wonderful investment of, of my time. And, you know, I think podcasting and media can be a great business, but the thing that I value the most out of it is I learn, like it is just an excuse to talk to the smartest people in the space about what they're doing. And that's a real, like, that is a intangible benefit that I think really pays off in, in my chat purity business. I think it's a, I mean, part of the reason that I do the solo founders podcast is because I want to learn, you know, from, from people.

52:19I feel like solo founding is something that, um, is still being figured out. Like everybody's doing it differently. Um, you know, there are more playbooks and rules of thumb for how to build startups with co-founders. Uh, so, so part of this is, is, you know, a lot of this is to learn and you don't, you wouldn't be able to learn from people nearly the same level of depth unless you had sort of a, you know, an avenue or an excuse. It's like an excuse. Yeah, totally. The thing that's really interesting about the podcast or the YouTube channel, I should say, is that you have this variety. So it's not just interviews.

52:52It's not just the coding and product videos. Is that something you started with early on? Is that something that you've learned anything about? Because I think that oftentimes people are a little bit worried. And I'll say, honestly, I don't know on my end what we should be doing with the solo founders. We mostly do interviews. At one point, we did this video where we did sort of a, it was me sort of going past, through past conversations, and sort of having this thread connecting each conversation, then little clips and commentary about each of them. People loved it. They said, this is amazing.

53:26We did it, frankly, because we had sort of a lull in the catalog. We got to try something new here. People loved it. But, you know, I guess it's one of those things where I'm curious sort of what you've learned, because, you know, in our end, we haven't really tried much beyond the interviews. But the one time we did, it showed some promise. So yeah, I just wanted to learn what you learned.

53:49Claire Vo:Yeah, so what I, one, what's so fun about the podcast is I don't know if you can tell, I am like a relentless learner. And so it's very interesting to learn a new business and learn a new product. And so I just definitely approach the podcast like a product. Like, what are we trying to achieve here? Like I'm trying to bring incredible value to our viewers and listeners. I want to make sure our sponsors feel like they're really well taken care of and that their investment is a great one. And I want to learn a bunch. And so what am I trying to achieve? And then I back into, well, what should be the shape of this and how do we execute on it well?

54:25Claire Vo:And again, you just approach it like a product. And so you'd say we have a product portfolio. We have our interviews product. We have our models review product. We have our mini episodes product. And how is the market, was the product market fit for any of those products? And then where do we double down and get more leverage on things that work for us? And it took a lot of experimentation. And I would say not all of it was purposeful. So early on, there was just stuff that I wanted to talk about that didn't fit the interview format. And so I just created content. It wasn't even actually ad sponsored for us.

55:04Claire Vo:It was just completely free content that we did that people really liked. And so once we figured out people liked this certain style of solo content, we could then build an editorial calendar around it and a sponsorship calendar around it that made sense for us and our sponsors and our listeners. And so it was a lot of iteration, and now we're very data-driven. But by we, I mean Howie, the Howie AI open claw is very data-driven. And so Howie runs a tight ship, Howie is doing like all of our analytics post-release, looking at all of our A-B tests, making recommendations on what titles and topics and guests might work.

55:46Claire Vo:And so we have augmented the podcast with some agentic horsepower to make sure that we're pointing everything in the right direction. But, you know, one of the things that I was talking to a friend about earlier this week is I think, you know, interview formats will still be very, very, very popular. But people, the people yearn for something different. And so, again, I use this as an opportunity. I was like really into TikTok for a while. I need to like go back to short form vertical content. There's some like Claude girls out there doing very cool stuff on TikTok. stock um so like is short form um a vehicle for us should we be doing more in short form should i be writing more like what is the business again is how i think about it and then what kind of products need to fit in the business and i just take a very like iterative product approach to it that's cool i guess one last technical question about sort of the open cloth stuff are you using like mac minis are you doing it in the cloud like what's all the fat stacks of mac minis okay so we i have four mac minis on my desk one is my work one um one is my husband's one is for the family and kids and then one is a perplexity computer it's running perplexity it's not running open claw um and i just like sneak peek into the vo lawless household my husband just run walks around mumbling like we need more compute and i'm like desperately looking for Mac studios so we have a very but you know my like nine-year-old is like who put who took my card pewter like where's my like where's my raspberry pi so we're very on brand wait so so the so each of those because you said you have something like eight or nine open claws so what's actually happening there with those so I have all my work ones on it so basically my friend Jesse Janae gave me this concept and I think it's really great which is like your machine is your sandbox and so I put all like chat PRD related workers in their own office and that office is my Mac Mini and they all have their own workspaces they all have their own desks but at the end of the day if like Polly wanders into Max's cubicle it's probably fine because it's all the same business but I don't necessarily want Polly wandering into like my kids homework and vice versa and so I've really like physically partitioned the agents based on the business they're attached to so my all my business stuff is on one all my husband's business stuff on the other the personal stuff is on one and then I have like we have a floater that we throw perplexity computer at and then like codex tasks at cool that's awesome I guess the last questions which we always wrap with are sort of the customary ones which is you know it's a little bit different because you're building such a different type of business but um we we'd love to close with like the reason to not be a solo founder um and then and then we talk about that for a minute or two and then we we go to the case for solo founding so what's the reason to not be a solo founder have all the money i don't think like ownership in in terms like equity ownership is the right lens.

58:59Claire Vo:And even the desire to be sort of the dictator of your own business. Like, I don't think my way or the highway, 100 % ownership is the right motivating factor because there's lots of ways to drive your opinion in businesses of all shapes and sizes. And so I don't think that's the right reason to be a solo founder is because you really feel like you're the, because honestly everybody has a boss my boss is just my customers um so you're never going to escape having a boss and um there can be lots of very exciting financial outcomes with with split ownership and so I don't think those are the reasons to be a solo founder you know because you talk about sort of like skill sets and things like that do you think that you think that skill sets are another reason or like I'm curious I'm curious like to not to not be solo yeah I mean I think there are attributes of people who would probably be quite unsuccessful being a solo founder.

59:57Claire Vo:One is if you just do not have a lot of intrinsic, if you're extrinsically motivated, it is helpful to have extrinsic motivators in the form of other people invested in your business, whether investors or employees or a founder. If you're not intrinsically motivated, and then if you're prone to like shiny object syndrome, it's often nice to have a moderating force on you. And if you honestly just don't have the complete skillset to do all the jobs at hand, I think it is actually very hard to be a solo founder with an extremely deep spike in one functional area. It's always, I think, better to be a little bit more rounded at the founder table, at the executive table, whatever that is early on, because I think you will avoid things that ultimately help you build a bigger business.

1:00:44I think that that makes a lot of sense. I'm happy we added that onto the end there. I guess the case for solo founding.

1:00:52Claire Vo:Oh, it's the best. You know, I've had co-founders. I have built businesses with employees. I've certainly run businesses with employees. And then I've done this all on my own. I would say I'm just like a very different shape of solo founder, right? Because you can be a solo founder, but take investment. Of course, yeah. You can be a solo founder and have lots of employees. You can be a solo founder and still have a board. I am like truly lone wolf solo founder. And so I think my perspective is going to be a little bit different, which is to truly own your own company allows you to shape a life you really want.

1:01:30Claire Vo:And that is just very different from allows you to build a billion dollar business. And I want to be very clear that those are not necessarily, they can't be overlap. Maybe they will be, we'll see you all make some more PRDs. But I do think the ability to not answer to anybody else's idea of what a successful life looks like and therefore what your successful business should look like is a very, very high value thing for being a solo entrepreneur, if not a solo founder because literally I can just say no to customers I don't want to work with literally I could just ship stuff that sparks joy for me that maybe customers want maybe they don't I can I can slow down the growth of the business if I want I just had a six month old guess what December when I was nine months pregnant was not a shining star chat PRD month and guess what no one complained to me about it not a not even a single open claw complained to me about it because they weren't around then.

1:02:32Claire Vo:And so like, I just think the ability to really have the life that you want is something that I wouldn't trade for right now. You know, as I tell people like many millions of dollars, you'd have to pay me to go back into a Slack with 500 people. Like my joy is very, very high now. And so I think that like true ownership of your, over your life, not your business, but over your life is, is something that I think people shouldn't underestimate. me. This is awesome. I mean, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you're the only human working on your business or the only human working on your business full time.

1:03:05So I know this, this is a lot. And, you know, I think it's just so great because you're providing a perspective that is very unique. You know, a lot of the people we talk to are building, you know, companies where they have funding and they have teams and things like that. And I think that different ways of building companies are amazing. I think that the cool thing about being a solo founder is that you truly, it's not about the dictatorship. It's about choosing really what you want. I call it authorship more. And this authorship of deciding what kind of book or what kind of thing you want to create around what your goals are is really great.

1:03:38I think it's so wonderful to have you on because you're able to share a different perspective, one that I think is going to be truly singular. So thank you for doing it.

1:03:46Claire Vo:Well, thank you. It was really fun. If you enjoyed this conversation, we would love it if you could share solo founders with everyone you know, particularly people who are considering starting companies solo or who are already doing it. You know, the entire goal of what we do is to normalize solo founding, encourage more people to solo found instead of end up with co-founders of convenience. If you'd like, and we'd really appreciate it, you can go leave a review on Apple. You can go give us a thumbs up. You can subscribe on the YouTube channel. Anything helps. And of course, if you are starting a company or considering starting a company, you should go look at the solo founders program.

1:04:19We work together with you in San Francisco alongside of a bunch of other solo founders. The idea is it's much better to be solo together than to be solo alone. I'll spend a lot of time helping you. And we also invest$100 ,000 in your company. So if you're excited to learn more about that, go check out solofounders.com slash program.