A Note From the Redbud VC Team
Welcome back to Field Notebook!
Here are some of the thoughts, essays, and hot takes that have surfaced across the Redbud team this month. In Edition #6 of Field Notebook, we discuss our new platform: Roots, when to fire, and the case for solo founders. 🌳
Redbud VC invests $250k-$500k in early-stage tech founders. We deliver insights and learnings we shared over the last month to our over 15,000 readers.
Why I Built Roots
Over the last five years, I've met with more than 5,000 entrepreneurs while building Redbud VC from mid-Missouri into a nationally known fund. One conclusion: talent is everywhere. Network connectivity is not.
Great entrepreneurs find a way, whether that means moving to San Francisco or staying home.
S-tier builders operate from first principles: time with customers first, capital second, and hire A-players when it hurts. Growth attracts capital, and network effects with customers and talent are what accelerate growth, no matter where the company is built.
The largest companies in the world were built by people from under-the-radar places. Some moved to connectivity. Some stayed. Where you start doesn't cap what you build.
But those roots and affinities are the guiding point to deepening connections and a sense of community.
We saw it firsthand. I posted an Outsider Roots NYC event on X and got over 100 DMs, each a paragraph on why someone was an outsider. In San Francisco, we packed a room with top AI talent with Midwest roots.
That's why we built Roots: a social platform connecting founders, talent, investors, and enterprises through shared roots. Import your network and Roots enriches it with AI. As you connect with members and join communities, their networks layer into yours. Roots is a shared graph you can query in plain English to find the right co-founder, customer, hire, or investor through the warmest path that already connects you, online and in real life.
Network graph: See your connections and shared context visualized, and find the warmest path to anyone in the network.
AI search: Query your extended network in plain language to find the right customer, hire, or co-founder through someone who already knows you both.
Communities: Join groups organized around industry verticals, geographic roots, and shared backgrounds where the people you meet already have a reason to trust you.
Enterprise partners: We’re starting with Missouri and the Midwest, where talent and company density is high but startup connectivity is not. Curated companies that joined specifically to work with startups before the rest of the market does.
Host: Create and manage events directly on Roots, with built-in matchmaking that surfaces the top three people you should meet at the event.
Events: Roots runs curated dinners and happy hours in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and across the Missouri Roadshow through St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. No panels or pitches. This year, we're launching the Roots Startup Summit, fka Missouri Startup Weekend, bringing together founders from across the country, enterprise partners, and investors who back people from places nobody was watching.
Fire Fast or Pay the Price
Most founders wait too long.
Whether it's an early hire, a co-founder or even a lover, the cost of sitting in a bad relationship compounds fast. Morale, momentum, opportunity cost.
One bad hire is enough to bring down your company’s culture. What I see again and again: the founders who move fast when it's not working come out better. If it’s not working now, it’s probably not going to change. Your intuition is generally correct.
If it's a co-founder, that's its own can of worms.
This tends to surface early. If you're carrying the company and your co-founder isn't, you'll know.
What I've seen work is simple. Founders who successfully work through it have the conversation before they do anything else. Share what you've observed: what you've done versus what they've done.
How they respond tells you everything. If they own it and there's a path forward, most give it another shot. If they deflect, that's usually the answer.
Gut-checking yourself before you act also helps. Share the situation with people you trust. Make sure you're being reasonable. Frustration clouds judgment more than founders expect.
If there's a deeper reason they're not pulling weight (lack of commitment, misaligned incentives, wrong skill set), don't wait. Fire fast. Sitting in a bad co-founder relationship is one of the most expensive decisions you can make.
Equal (50/50) splits with a non-performing co-founder are the worst version of this. You can't outvote them or easily remove them. Although they would be incentivized to leave if there are clear misalignments, there will most likely be negotiations around equity.
That’s why the best way to deal with this situation is to find the right co-founder in the first place.
If they're not working out and you can't buy them out, leaving and starting your own thing may be the cleaner path.
IP assignments + Equity agreements have to be sorted before anyone leaves. If you haven't raised capital yet, it's relatively clean. If you have raised money, severance becomes part of the conversation.
Vesting cliffs exist for exactly this reason. If it’s under a year and they don't owe equity, you might still want to offer something. Early work has value, and an olive branch costs you a little equity but buys you a lot of goodwill.
Once you've parted ways, be honest about what you need. What skill sets does the company require? Who do you want on the other side of the table for the next ten years? Start those conversations early. Those searches can take awhile, and the best co-founders aren't found when you're desperate.
There’s always a way forward. As an entrepreneur, it’s your job to find it. Don't let one bad hire be the reason your company dies.
The Case for Solo Founders
Last week, we talked about co-founder disputes: how to handle equity splits, what to do when things go sideways, and how to protect yourself when the relationship breaks.
But there's a simpler fix not everyone considers: don't have a co-founder at all.
I know. That's heresy in most VC circles. The conventional wisdom is that solo founding is startup mistake number one. Paul Graham literally wrote that in 2006. YC has spent two decades preaching the co-founder gospel. Find your technical partner, split the equity, divide and conquer the world.
I've seen this narrative play out. The data tells a more complicated story.
@alitamaseb studied over 1,100 US-based unicorns. One in five was built by a single founder. That’s 20%.
And when @IlyaStrebulaev at Stanford ran the numbers on net exit value per co-founder across those same unicorns, solo founders came out on top. $2.1 billion in expected net exit value per founder, compared to $1.4 billion for duos. Each additional co-founder reduces that number by about 32%.
There is nuance. Solo founders are underrepresented relative to their share of the overall startup population. They're a harder path. Fewer people attempt it, and a smaller percentage of those who do make it to unicorn status compared to two or three-founder teams.
But the ones who do capture more with a higher success rate. As a solo founder, if you do win, you win more.
You don’t have to worry about an equity split or a co-founder breakup if you have no co-founder. The pie is yours.
I know what you’re probably thinking: Why haven’t there been more solo founders in the past?
The reason solo founding has always been hard is capacity. One person can only do so much. You need someone to write code while you're selling. Someone to handle operations while you're fundraising. That constraint is being dismantled by AI.
@snowmaker at YC said: what used to take five engineers now takes one engineer with AI tools. A quarter of W25 YC startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated. The minimum viable team is shrinking in real time.
When I look at the cost structure, it's hard to argue against solo founding. A traditional ten-person team runs $80–120K a month fully loaded. A solo founder running AI agents spends $300–500. Think about that for a second.
Carta tracked it in the numbers. Solo-founded startups went from 23.7% of new companies in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025. The market is voting.
@sama has a betting pool among tech CEOs on when the first one-person billion-dollar company will appear.
@DarioAmodei put a timeline on it: 2026, with 70–80% confidence. The categories he named (developer tools, proprietary trading, automated customer service) all share something in common. They're software businesses where judgment and distribution are more important than headcount.
AI raised the floor on what one person can build. This means the differentiation has moved more towards taste, judgment, and who you're building for. Things you don't really need a co-founder for.
I’m not saying co-founders are wrong. Two-founder teams still show strong execution metrics. The right partner can compound what you build. In addition to the psychological support of having someone to spar with and count on. For certain businesses, such as enterprise sales, regulated industries, and physical supply chains… You probably need one.
But the blanket assumption that solo founding is a liability? That's an artifact of an older era. The tools and cost structure have changed. The data on outcomes have always been more favorable than the narrative suggested.
The 20% of unicorns built by one person never waited for permission to build.
Until next time,
Redbud VC
This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. The authors and publishers are not licensed financial advisors.