- Firms exist to reduce transaction costs of using the market, per Coase's theory, with growth stopping when internal coordination costs equal market costs.
- The gig economy lowered transaction costs but didn't create solo unicorns because coordination load on founders remained unscalable.
- AI now enables scaling of a single person's coordination capacity, addressing the bottleneck the gig economy couldn't, potentially allowing solo-founder unicorns.
- This shifts Coase's boundary toward individuals, particularly for coordination-heavy, collaboration-light work, but firms persist for asset-specific, trust-based, or regulated tasks.
- The first solo-founder unicorn is predicted within this decade, built around a coordination layer managing contractors and AI agents.