Solo-Founder 101: How Anyone Can Start a Business Using AI

A new generation of founders and solo-entrepreneurs is building and launching companies on their own, leveraging AI as their advantage. They are running customer interviews, stress-testing ideas, conducting market research, and building pitch decks in a fraction of the time it used to take entire teams.  

Our Speaker and Managing Director, Erdinc Ekinci, who has worked with hundreds of founders across Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, has seen firsthand how AI is collapsing the gap between idea and execution. In this session, he will share the exact prompts, tools, and workflows that solo-founders are using right now to move faster with less, covering everything from customer development and competitive research to product scoping and investor pitching.

If you have an idea but don't know where to start, or you're already building and want to work smarter, this session will give you a concrete and practical playbook to take action.

Venue: Venture Cafe Tokyo.

Agenda:

• Welcome and Introduction
• Discussion on key topics
• Q&A Session
• Networking Session

Featured Speaker:

• Erdinc Ekinci - Founder, Investment Lead of Co-capital.vc, Co-Founder, CEO of Openfor.co, Managing Director of Founder Institute Japan/Korea/Taiwan

What You'll Learn:

• How to use AI to stress-test your startup idea and run faster customer development.
• Specific prompts and tool combinations for market research, competitive analysis, and prototyping.
• How to craft and practice your pitch using AI, including building a full pitch deck with Claude Skills.

Who Should Attend:

• Aspiring founders who want to start a business but lack technical skills
• Entrepreneurs exploring how AI can accelerate their startup journey
• Professionals considering launching a side project or solo startup
• Early-stage founders interested in AI-powered workflows

About Ecosystem Organization:

• ​Founder Institute: Founder Institute is an equity warrant-based non-funding accelerator that supports determined founders who already have some scalable ideas and are committed to entrepreneurship. At this stage, founders validate their ideas, build a strong founder mindset, and learn through structured programs, mentorship, and accountability. Founder Institute helps turn raw ideas into real startup foundations.

• ​Founder Capital: Founder Capital is a venture capital firm focused on investing in FI’s best-performing pre-seed full-time founders who have already demonstrated traction. This layer supports founders who are building full-time, executing consistently, and showing early signs of market validation. It provides capital, strategic guidance, and long-term partnership to help founders scale with confidence.

• Openfor.co: It is an entrepreneurial talent development company and non-equity venture/ecosystem builder supporting individuals and organizations starting from individual-level; detects high-potential people with our proprietary system, developing and featuring personal stories to launching a digitally productized personal brands, content creation and visibility with our 700K audience reach, to turning it into a business, and monetization to all the way up to launching a company. All-in-one platform with a marketplace, education, back-office support, content creation, and global reach, combining early visibility with hands-on operational support. Meanwhile, as an ecosystem builder, we work with more later-stage startups, larger enterprises, and governments, building and operating complex multinational 7-8 figure programs. It all boils down to this: we are on a mission to make the venture ecosystem accessible, making the world a more entrepreneurial place.

• Venture Cafe Tokyo: A global community where various innovators, including entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and students, gather, connect, and create innovation in society through a variety of programs.

• ​Co-Capital: Co-capital is a strategic VC-as-a-Service firm pre-seed to Series A stage, focused on seeking strong partner alignment. Specializing in GTM expansion, venture building, and marketing-led growth, working with elite entrepreneurial talent and scalable startups preparing for global GTM and investment readiness. Powered by a 300+ individual expert network and delivered in close collaboration with Founder Institute and Openfor.co, enabling fast momentum and execution.