Co-founders suck…
I know, that sounds harsh.
Hear me out.
If you find the right person, a co-founder can be one of the best things that happens to your startup.
Someone you have known for years. Someone who shares your values, has the same level of ambition, is humble enough to learn, smart enough to challenge you, and brings skills you don't have.
That kind of partnership is rare.
The problem is that finding that person is incredibly difficult.
Starting a company is already hard. Now add finding someone who is willing to take the same risks, commit the same amount of time, make decisions under pressure, and stay aligned when things get messy.
A great co-founder relationship can accelerate a company.
The wrong one can destroy it.
Founder conflict is one of the most common reasons startups fail, and research from Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman has highlighted how founder decisions and relationships can create major risks for new companies.
So what happens if you have the idea, the ambition, and the willingness to build—but you don't have the perfect person to build alongside you?
For the first time, we may have another option.
An AI co-founder.
Not a chatbot that answers questions when you ask.
Not another productivity tool.
A partner that is always available. One that can help research markets, build products, create content, find customers, analyze results, and keep pushing the business forward.
That is the idea behind leapd.ai.
Leapd is an AI co-founder that helps founders build and run a business end-to-end. You start with an idea, and Leapd can help with everything from researching opportunities and building products to marketing, outreach, and growth.
The goal isn't to replace human founders.
The goal is to remove one of the biggest barriers to entrepreneurship: needing the perfect team before you can start.
For decades, building a company required capital, connections, and a network of people who could fill every role.
AI changes that equation.
Maybe the future of startups isn't always a team of three people sitting in a garage.
Maybe it's one founder with an AI team working alongside them.
The specific gap worth pressing on is judgment under pressure. A co-founder earns trust by being right about hard calls when the data is incomplete and the clock is running, not by researching markets or drafting content. An AI partner can take real work off a solo founder's plate, but the founder conflict research being cited here is mostly about disagreements over equity, roles, and commitment, not about task execution, so it is worth being precise about which problem this actually solves versus which one it just makes less painful to go without.
this is wild - I wonder what part of a business your portfolio companies fully dedicate to their AI co-founder vs what they still prefer to do themselves?
this reminds me of when we had an elevator man that was manually stopping the elevator at each floor - and now we have a simple panel so we pick which floor to stop! starting a business will be so much easier in now - does Leapd do incorporation and full initial set up too or just on the build and marking side for now?
my co-founder stayed for one year when his quite was vested left and used the learning we had to kick of a new business which he sold for millions few years latter and we had to still buy back his shares when doing our series A round - I deeply believe leapd has a special place in the future when you bypass all the co-founder matching sh*t - I actually just started engage-2 on leapd, excited to see where it goes
Sorry to hear this, @emrasmith; you are not alone - I know a founder who has exactly the same problem. Even the co-founder of self-driving car company Cruise, who left litter in the first few months after the company's inception, came back when Cruise did its IPO, asking for money!!
Thank you for trying Leapd! Your business looks fantastic and tackles a real problem. I'm excited to see it grow and thrive.
The interesting assumption isn't whether AI can do more work—it's whether founders actually treat it as a substitute for having another person beside them.
From the founders you've spoken with so far, are they coming to Leapd because they genuinely don't want a human co-founder, or because they still want one but haven't found the right person yet?
Love this question @aryan_sinh - having a GOOD human co-founder who has the same interest as you, is humble, capable, and willing to work 24/7 with a little to no salary is a luxury that many don't have.
I had a human co-founder in my previous startups; there was always tension, slow work, and I had to constantly push them so they got something done!
An AI co-founder is always there, costs 1000X less, no nagging, no argument, no taking a day off- and more importantly, it is super capable across frontend, backend, marketing, and that helps you ship fast, get your first customers, or realize you should put your time and money on a new idea -> speed is everything.
I would say even if you have a human co-founder, it is still super valuable to hire an agent from Leapd; it increases your efficiency and ROI by 1000x
I always had issues with my co-founder until I found a really good one - a good co-founder is demand and a bad one destroyed your life and business all together
100% @rozisanti
does LEAPD support e-commerce too?
Yes, @johnmcd - if you have a Shopify or e-commerce website, just leave the GTM side to Leapd. This is actually a common use case: you connect your existing business and let Leapd run full GTM, including Meta ads, email outreach, LinkedIn engagement and campaigns, and search visibility and backlinks.
the landscape is changing rapidly, one person billion dollar business is realistic now
indeed @sanatavasol