Deborah Hanus is the co-founder and CEO of Sparrow, a San Francisco-based HR technology company that combines AI automation with human expertise to manage employee leave. Armed with degrees from MIT (BS in Computer Science and Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MEng in EECS) and a Harvard PhD in Computer Science & Machine Learning, she left academia after watching six close friends struggle through the leave process and built the company from scratch as a solo founder. Sparrow has raised $55M in total funding (Series B led by Silver Lake Waterman in July 2025), serves 1,000+ companies including OpenAI and Reddit, and has saved customers over $350 million in payroll costs.
Pieter Levels (levelsio) is a Dutch solo founder, serial indie hacker, and bootstrapping legend who built a $3M/year portfolio of AI and remote-work tools — NomadList, Remote OK, PhotoAI, InteriorAI, and a viral flight simulator — entirely alone, with no investors, no employees, and a stubborn preference for vanilla PHP. He pioneered the digital nomad community, co-launched the EU/acc movement, and turned a 2014 Google Spreadsheet tweet into a global platform. His build-in-public style and radical transparency reshaped how a generation of founders think about success.
Simon Grimm is a German developer educator and solo founder who has spent over a decade teaching web developers to build mobile apps. Best known for Galaxies.dev and his earlier Devdactic blog, he was voted the #1 React Native video creator by the community. Beyond tutorials, he's building Tiny Harvest - a cozy idle farm RPG - entirely by himself. He went fully self-employed in 2017 and hasn't looked back.
Harry Dry is a British solo entrepreneur and the creator of Marketing Examples, the self-proclaimed #1 marketing newsletter with 130,000+ subscribers. Built from a pre-marathon epiphany in Paris in May 2019, his newsletter distills world-class marketing and copywriting into sharp, visual, bite-sized breakdowns sent every Monday. With zero paid ads, he grew an audience of 110,000+ across platforms, earned the endorsement of writer David Perell who called him 'the best copywriter I know,' and turned a $1,000 investment into a full-time business - all while operating as a one-man show.
Michael Lynch is a bootstrapped solo founder who quit Google after seven years to build software and hardware businesses entirely on his own terms. He grew TinyPilot - a KVM-over-IP device built from a $100 Raspberry Pi kit - into a $1M/year business and sold it in 2024 for ~$600K. He writes with radical transparency about money, failure, and the craft of independent software development at mtlynch.io, and is now writing 'Refactoring English', a book on writing for software engineers.