Far from harming, artificial intelligence could be helping more businesses launch (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP) (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP, Getty Images)
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At 2 a.m. in Tel Aviv last spring, former data company CEO Maor Shlomo woke up to an alarm on his phone and went to his laptop to make sure his servers were still running. He repeated this every few hours for several months. He didn’t have a team. He single-handedly founded a software company called Base44 in four months using AI coding tools. The only thing that kept his platform down for six hours was an alarm. One night, the site went down due to a sudden increase in traffic. Fortune reportedI caught it in 10 minutes. In June 2025, Wix acquired his company for $80 million.
This story is not unusual. All the founders in my network have similar stories. At a small dinner in San Francisco last month, a founder I’ve known since 2018 described his company to the table: “It’s me, my dog, and about 40 AI agents.” She wasn’t cute. She exited her last startup, took six months off, and quietly built a compliance software product that now serves nearly 300 customers. There is only one person in charge of payroll. Functionally, her team is surrounded by a wall of subscriptions to Claude, ChatGPT, Replit, and a bunch of agent tools I’ve never heard of.
All the founders at the table were nodding their heads as if they knew someone else was doing the same thing. Half of them did.
The dominant press still frames AI as a story of retrenchment. That means layoffs at Meta, layoffs at Oracle, and cross-cutting efforts across engineering, marketing, and middle management. That story is true. What gets missed is what’s happening on the other side of the ledger.
According to U.S. Census Bureau Business Formation StatisticsAmericans filed 1.56 million new business applications from November 2025 to January 2026, the largest three-month stretch since the series began in 2004, and 532,319 applications were filed in January alone, a 36.8 percent increase over the same month last year. The average monthly number of small business formations now exceeds 478,000, an increase of more than 435 percent from the 2004 pace of approximately 90,000 per month. The number of people listing themselves as “founders” on LinkedIn has increased by 69% year-over-year.
The story of hiring AI is not just a story of layoffs. This is a story of redistribution, and the winners will look nothing like the incumbents that most of the headlines focus on.
What does this founder wave actually look like?
The clearest reading of this came on July 6, when Nathaniel Whitmore dedicated the following episode: AI Daily Brief He called this phenomenon the rise of the one-man million-dollar company. His argument was direct. AI isn’t just going to change jobs, it’s going to change the risk-reward calculations when starting a company. The calculus changes for would-be founders when a single operator with an AI agent can perform tasks previously required of a Series A team. The same goes for the decision a fired senior manager makes when considering whether to pursue a director role or put something of his own into the world.
AI won’t just change jobs. It is changing the risk-reward calculus in company formation.
Beatrice Nolan of Fortune magazine traced the mechanism. May 18th special feature. Alongside Shlomo, she profiled nonprofit consultant Dana Snyder. He used Replit’s AI coding tools to build a software platform that guides small nonprofits in building monthly giving programs. Approximately 93 percent of U.S. nonprofits serve organizations that are too small to hire human consultants. Ms. Snyder remains her company’s only full-time employee.
“If you can use AI to do manual, repeatable tasks, you can spend more brainpower thinking of ideas, which is all you really need to spend your time on as humans,” Snyder said in an interview with Fortune magazine.
Data has caught up with anecdote. J.P. Eggers, a professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told Fortune that the average number of employees at a one-year-old company has been declining for 20 years. Twenty years ago, a one-year-old company employed seven to nine people. 2-3 years ago, 3-4 years ago. The AI is compressing that number towards 1.
Why should we read the number of layoffs differently?
of World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 By 2030, 92 million jobs will be lost and 170 million new jobs will be created worldwide, with a net gain of 78 million. Although these predictions have been widely reported, they are equally widely questioned because the layoffs are concrete and the new hires theoretical.
However, founder data is a new job that appeared early. A laid-off product marketer may start a consulting firm with an AI research stack and one contractor, but his work won’t show up on hiring reports at large companies. This is listed on the Census Bureau’s EIN submission. It’s not a rebrand. It is a real-time reorganization of the labor market.
The Wall Street Journal has been tracking similar trends at the very end. Report on teenage founders Build a real company using vibe coding and social media without the need for VC or staff. The point is not that a 15-year-old can now do it. Importantly, the same tools sit on the desks of every laid-off knowledge worker in the United States.
Which skills are actually important right now?
As winning careers change from employee to operator, from specialist in a large company to generalist in a small team, the skills that are rewarded change accordingly. Three are more important than the other three.
The first is creativity, especially the ability to ask questions that no one has thought of before. Generative models provide what the average person might want. Founders who move forward present and drive constraints, specific customer pain points, or unexpected combinations of two areas. Ask boring questions and you’ll join a boring company. of World Economic Forum Labor Force Survey As AI absorbs routine work, creativity becomes a skill that becomes more and more important, not less.
The second is skepticism. The single most expensive habit an AI user can build is trusting the first answer. Large-scale language models predict the next most plausible word, not the most correct word. Stanford AI Index document that the hallucination rate plateaued rather than disappeared as the model expanded. Treat all AI output as a first draft and never as a final answer. That power is what separates founders from bot operators.
The third thing is curiosity. The half-life of technical skills is currently less than 2.5 years, according to the Labor Force Survey compiled in . PwC’s 2026 Global AI Employment Barometer. The founders who will grow even more over the next 10 years will not be the ones who mastered one tool. They will assume that all the tools they use today will be obsolete in 18 months, and will treat learning the next tool as a real job.
The AI economy is quietly redrawing where jobs exist, who owns them, and what it takes to create them. Aspiring founders should stop reading reports of layoffs as bad news and start reading the Census report as a map of where work will take them over the next decade. Founders who inspire with creativity, ask with skepticism, and flex their learning muscles in two-year increments won’t just survive in this economy. They will be staffing it.
