The Silicon Valley Small Business, the SVSB, is a hybrid of sorts—it intertwines small business values and discipline with big-tech know-how and ambition.

The tech industry is built on the venture capital model where hockey stick growth and selling to a larger company or going public are markers of success. But the traditional VC model does not leave much room for startups that might not be the next unicorn but still generate revenue — just not the type of returns investors are looking for.

The share of solo-founder startups has almost doubled in the last few years2, and the first examples of businesses with a handful of employees generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue have emerged. Henri Shi, who spent nearly a decade growing super.com into a $150M ARR business, is now tracking the progress towards Altman’s one-person... See more