The startup world celebrates partnership. Silicon Valley mythology is built on garage duos and founding trios who conquered industries together. But there's another path, quieter and considerably lonelier, that gets far less attention. Annie Liao, founder of Build Club, knows this reality well.
At 24, she raised $1.75 million for her AI education platform. She quit her chief of staff position at a Series B company, packed up, and moved to San Francisco. On paper, it looks like a dream launch. In practice, she's learning what it means to build something significant while facing every decision, every crisis, and every 3 AM work session entirely alone.
The night before announcing her funding round should have been celebratory. Instead, Liao found herself solo at her computer until 3 AM, building the landing page herself because her five-person team had gone to sleep. There was no co-founder to split the work with, no partner to commiserate with, no one to tell her it could wait until morning. She sat there and cried. Then she finished the page.
The Numbers Don't Lie About Going Solo
Research from MIT Sloan challenges the conventional wisdom that founding teams outperform solo entrepreneurs. Companies started by solo founders actually survive longer than those started by teams. Solo founders are 2.6 times more likely to own an ongoing, for-profit venture compared to teams of three or more founders.
The advantage appears to stem from decision-making speed and reduced interpersonal friction. While founding teams bring broader expertise and larger networks, they also introduce coordination costs. Every strategic pivot requires discussion, consensus-building, and compromise. For a solo founder with clear vision, decisions happen at the speed of thought.
But survival rates don't capture the human cost. Liao describes her daily reality as an "endless task list" combined with "constant goal chasing." Most of her day is spent working alone, even though she leads a team spread across multiple time zones. The isolation hits hardest during moments of doubt or exhaustion, when there's no co-founder to share the emotional burden.
Being Young, Female, and Underestimated
Gender adds another layer of complexity to Liao's journey. Female founders secured $38.8 billion in venture funding in 2024, representing just 20 percent of total VC investment despite a 27 percent increase from the previous year. Companies with all-female founding teams received an even smaller slice: just 1 percent of total capital invested in US venture-backed startups in 2024.
Liao feels the weight of these statistics personally. She's acutely aware of being underestimated as a young female founder. The precautions she takes reveal the additional calculations she makes daily. When attending tech events, she's deliberate about her appearance, carefully considering dress and makeup choices. Not out of vanity, but because looking "too fashionable" might suggest she's not serious enough about building her company.
The concerns extend to professional interactions. While male founders casually grab drinks with investors to close deals, Liao hesitates. She worries such meetings might be misinterpreted. Even her social media presence requires strategic thinking, from the clothes she wears in photos to making sure her posts don't suggest she has too much free time.
These aren't paranoid worries. Research from Harvard Business Review shows VCs ask male founders about potential gains while questioning female founders about potential losses. This bias appears across both male and female investors and significantly impacts funding outcomes.
The 3 AM Reality Check
There's a specific moment that defines the solo founder experience: being sick with no one to pick up the slack. Getting overwhelmed with no immediate support system that shares your commitment level. Facing a crisis at 3 AM with no co-founder to call. Liao has lived through all of these.
When she's unwell, the work doesn't pause. When doubt creeps in during dark hours, she confronts it alone. The responsibility is unrelenting and undiluted. But she's reframed this challenge into something productive. Rather than measuring success solely by Build Club's ultimate outcome, she views the journey as personal skill development.
"The experience has consistently built my mental resilience," Liao explains. Each challenge overcome independently, each crisis navigated solo, each early morning grind session adds to what she considers her resilience bank account. This perspective shift matters. It transforms the solo path from purely business risk into guaranteed personal growth, regardless of the company's fate.
Building an AI Education Platform
Build Club started as a weekend project among friends tackling AI challenges. Liao was working in venture capital at Aura Ventures at the time, and the community naturally became founder-focused. What began as informal meetups evolved into one of the largest AI communities in the region, with over 4,500 members across APAC.
The company experimented extensively throughout its first year, running more than 100 events including free AI accelerators for 1,000-plus builders, hackathons, reading groups, and networking mixers. At one point, they even considered becoming a VC firm themselves.
The pivot to an e-learning platform came from recognizing scalability challenges. While the community approach worked well, it proved difficult to scale while maintaining what Liao calls the "serendipity and magic" that made Build Club special. The new model focuses on project-based learning, offering certifications through an AI-powered platform with a one-to-one teacher-student ratio.
Build Club's vision is ambitious: becoming the training campus for 1 million AI builders by 2026. The business model combines a two-sided marketplace with enterprise upskilling offerings, allowing the platform to grow while keeping community access free for builders.
The Co-Founder Question
Liao hasn't completely ruled out adding a co-founder, but her criteria reveal how the solo journey has shaped her thinking. She would only consider someone with the same "all-in mindset" that she brings. She compares the decision to building a relationship, recognizing that a co-founder arrangement is essentially committing to building a shared future together.
This selectivity makes sense given what research shows about founding teams. While conventional wisdom favors multiple founders, data from a Wharton study of 3,526 businesses found that startups with single founders lasted longer and eventually achieved higher revenue than those with two or more co-founders. The likely explanation involves decision-making dynamics: teams make slower, more collaborative decisions and are less likely to take bold risks.
The venture capital world has historically favored founding teams. Y Combinator admits only about 10 percent solo founders to its program. Most Sand Hill Road VCs express preference for teams. But this investor bias may be working backwards. Founders who plan their entire startup strategy around what investors prefer, rather than what customers need, often struggle regardless of team size.
What the Data Shows About Solo vs. Team Founders
Finding Support Systems
Being a solo founder doesn't mean being completely alone. Liao has built support systems around her journey. She credits mentors including Julia Wells, former Harken COO and WhatsApp executive, who believed in her before she had conviction about going full-time. Maxine Minter from Co Ventures has also provided guidance through the process.
The raise itself tells an interesting story. People believed in Liao and invested in Build Club before she personally felt ready to commit full-time. "I'd never really pictured myself as a VC startup founder," she admits. "When we founded Build Club, it wasn't to go [down the] VC route."
That path from side project to venture-backed startup required overcoming significant internal resistance. Getting the funding proved more stressful than expected, particularly as a solo founder building a team and hiring a CTO from scratch. She's grateful to now have a CTO she trusts, which has eased some of the technical burden.
The Bigger Picture on Female Founders
Liao's experience sits within broader patterns affecting female entrepreneurs. Only 20.5 percent of first financings went to women-led startups in 2024, down from 26.5 percent in 2020. This decline at the earliest stage suggests fewer opportunities for new female entrepreneurs to enter and scale within the VC ecosystem.
The data reveals another troubling pattern: investors who experience a poor outcome from a woman-led startup become hesitant to fund other female founders. But experiencing success with female-led companies doesn't proportionally increase their willingness to invest in other women. This asymmetric learning creates cumulative disadvantage across the ecosystem.
Yet female-founded companies demonstrate superior capital efficiency. They generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested compared to just 31 cents for male-founded startups. Female-led companies also exit 6 months faster on average and represented 24.3 percent of total US VC exits in 2024, a record high.
Lessons from the Frontier
When asked what advice she'd give aspiring founders, Liao's guidance is refreshingly direct: "Just do it" and "take a bet on yourself." It's not the framework-heavy tactical advice that fills startup podcasts. It's something more personal, a fundamental call to action rooted in self-belief.
Her perspective on the journey itself has matured beyond simple success metrics. "I see the journey as a way of upskilling personally, even if the business doesn't work out," she notes. At 24, she's already internalizing lessons that many founders never learn: the entrepreneurial path changes you as much as it builds your company.
This mindset appears essential for solo founders in particular. Without the built-in validation and support of a co-founding team, finding internal motivation and framing challenges as growth opportunities becomes survival-critical.
The Reality Behind the Headlines
Annie Liao's story pushes back against sanitized startup narratives. There are no inspirational montages, no team huddles before big pitches, no co-founder celebrations when milestones hit. There's the quiet persistence of someone who chose the hardest path because it aligned with her vision.
The tech industry obsesses over outcomes: funding announcements, valuation milestones, acquisition headlines. The human cost of reaching those outcomes gets glossed over. Liao's openness about loneliness, gender bias, late-night work sessions, and emotional taxation offers a more complete picture. It's uncomfortable and unglamorous. It's also honest.
As Build Club grows and Liao's mental resilience strengthens, her journey provides both warning and inspiration. The solo founder path isn't for everyone. It probably shouldn't be. But for those with the fortitude, clear vision, and willingness to bet on themselves through the loneliest hours, it remains a viable way to build something meaningful.
Whether Build Club reaches its goal of training 1 million AI builders or serves primarily as Liao's entrepreneurial education, she's already succeeding at something harder: building the resilience to continue when there's no one else in the room to witness the struggle.
At 24, she's learning in real-time what many founders never face until much later. The landing pages built alone at 3 AM. The tears shed in private. The decisions made without consensus. The victories celebrated solo. This is the reality of building something significant on your own terms, even when those terms include confronting isolation, bias, and self-doubt without a co-founder safety net.
