Jesse Qin
Founder of Solo Unicorn Lab, New York
Jesse Qin (Yubo Qin) is the founder of Solo Unicorn Lab in New York, building context systems for people and AI agents.
Not to be confused with other people named Jesse Qin. This Jesse Qin, also known as Yubo Qin, founded Solo Unicorn Lab and earned a PhD in Computer Engineering at Rutgers University.
Going AI-native
Jesse is rebuilding how he works and lives around AI, as a bet that one person with a team of AI agents can do what used to take a company.
Life in AGI
Before building anything, Jesse started writing Life in AGI: what happens to work, learning, creativity and agency once AI is good enough to do most of what we do.
Living with AI, measured
AI is in how Jesse works and lives every day. His AI token usage is published live, straight from his own machines, at jesseqin.me/ai-usage.
Solo Unicorn Lab & Club
Jesse believes the one-person company is real. Solo Unicorn Lab is where he builds toward it, and Solo Unicorn Club is where founders in New York try it together.
As of this build, Jesse has used 71.1 billion AI tokens in 2026, about 145 million a day over the last 30 days, with AI in the loop on 268 of 295 days.
Along the way
- Presented at Knowledge Graph Conference 2026, Cornell Tech, New York (May 4, 2026).
- Curated hundreds of open-source AI projects into the bilingual Solo Unicorn Toolbox.
- Published Context Graph, a public thesis on context AI agents can act on.
Projects
- Solo Unicorn Lab & Solo Unicorn Club: The company Jesse founded to build one-person companies run with teams of AI agents, and its founder community in New York.
- AI Usage: A public, daily-updated dashboard of the AI tokens Jesse uses across his machines.
- Life in AGI: Writing and research on work, learning, creativity and human agency as AI gets better.
- Context Graph: A public thesis and reference model for context that AI agents can act on inside an organization.
- Solo Unicorn Toolbox: A bilingual, weekly-synced catalog of open-source AI projects for one-person companies.
Background
- Founder, Solo Unicorn Lab (now)
- Senior Member of Technical Staff, Kamiwaza (2025–2026)
- PhD in Computer Engineering, Rutgers University (2016–2021)
- MSBAi (Business Analytics and AI), NYU Stern School of Business (2024–2025)
The people building AI are saying it too
Moments Jesse cut into the opening film for a Solo Unicorn event, each linked to its original source.
“…a little betting pool for when the first one-person billion-dollar company will get started.”
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI · The Rundown AI, 2025“Asked when the first billion-dollar company with one human employee will appear: “2026.””
Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic · Code with Claude, 2025“We're going to see solopreneurs, single-person companies that are billion-dollar businesses, and that is already starting to happen.”
Greg Brockman, President, OpenAI · LinkedIn News“I do think a one-person company could be a billion-dollar company.”
Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb · Yahoo Finance, 2026“It's just going to be like one-person company.”
Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla & SpaceX · Moonshots #220, 2026“That lab can become a one-person company, and that could be you.”
Garry Tan, President & CEO, Y Combinator · Stanford CS153, 2026“Sometimes some of my one-person teams with support around them are my fastest moving teams.”
Andrew Ng, Founder, DeepLearning.AI · Imagination in Action, 2026“The IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.”
Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA · CES 2025 keynote“The first company in the world to grow a billion agents inside itself, self-replicating and self-evolving.”
Masayoshi Son, CEO, SoftBank Group · TV Tokyo WBS, 2025“From people dividing work among people, to mixed teams of people and agents: a super-organization.”
Robin Li, CEO, Baidu · Baidu Create, 2026“We would actually probably see people in this room operating a thousand X.”
Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind · Y Combinator, 2026“…a 10,000-person organization… in the future, almost everyone is going to have that.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta · This Past Weekend, 2025“Have a computer go and run your ad campaigns… integrate with Stripe.”
Aravind Srinivas, CEO, Perplexity · All-In Podcast, 2026“These are workflows that used to require entire teams. Now a single person with AI agents can do all of that.”
Lawrence Wong, Prime Minister of Singapore · May Day Rally, 2026“…the one, the two, the three-person company that would have taken critical mass, 15 or 20 people.”
Scott Bessent, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury · G20 remarks, 2026“One person now can operate like a 10-person or 100-person company.”
Kuo Zhang, President, Alibaba.com · Yahoo Finance, 2026“This would have been a team of probably 20 people, but now it's one person.”
Kai-Fu Lee, Founder, Sinovation Ventures & 01.AI · Bloomberg, 2026“It's really hard for one person to see everything across their business, all the controls…”
Dan Priest, Chief AI Officer, PwC US · Nicholas Thompson, 2026
Questions people ask
Who is Jesse Qin?
Jesse Qin (Yubo Qin) is the founder of Solo Unicorn Lab in New York, building context systems for people and AI agents.
Is Jesse Qin the same person as Yubo Qin?
Yes. Jesse Qin is also known as Yubo Qin; his full name is Jesse Yubo Qin.
What is Jesse Qin working on now?
Solo Unicorn Lab, a company built around one person running a company with a team of AI agents, and Solo Unicorn Club, its founder community in New York.
What did Jesse Qin do before Solo Unicorn Lab?
He was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Kamiwaza (2025–2026), working on enterprise AI infrastructure, ontology, context graphs and agent workflows.
How can I contact Jesse Qin?
Email jesse@solounicorn.club, or find him on LinkedIn, GitHub and X (@jesseqin_).