Julian Au doesn’t believe in buzzwords—he builds around them. As the founder and CEO of DePINed, a self-funded AI and Web3 infrastructure company, Julian’s journey is a roadmap of what next-generation entrepreneurship could look like: solo operators empowered by AI, bootstrapping real-world impact at scale, and using token economies not as hype machines, but as functional incentives.
“Most businesses don’t have a business problem. They have a founder or CEO problem,” Julian said bluntly during his appearance on The Coinrock Show.
“If you look at major bankruptcies, it’s actually surprisingly not about the actual business and the mechanics of the business, but usually something related to the decision making or the past trauma of the founding team or the founder himself”
In a world where founding once meant raising venture capital and hiring in bulk, Julian is pushing a radically different model—one that’s leaner, smarter, and arguably more powerful.
The Rise of the AI Solopreneur
During his guest appearance on The Show, Julian made a case that resonated deeply with builders watching market tides shift from community maximalism to product realism.
“No one gives a shit about your product anymore. No one gives a shit about your IP, your product or your idea,” he said bluntly.
“It’s actually traction. An investor wants to buy your attraction.”
For Julian, traction doesn’t necessarily come from headcount or social hype. It comes from iteration speed—made possible today through AI. With tools that enable everything from product generation to market testing and automated customer engagement, he argues that modern founders are essentially entering a phase of solo hyperscaling.
In Julian’s words, we’re already seeing “AI freelance SaaS founders,” people who can build a full-stack startup without writing code or hiring a team. He’s building DePINed for this very demographic: a platform that provides infrastructure and APIs for anyone to spin up production-grade AI tools and scale them at a fraction of the cost of traditional cloud services.
Why Tokenization Still Matters—If You Get It Right
While AI enables speed, Web3 provides structure. But Julian isn’t interested in token hype. He’s obsessed with token mechanics that make sense.
In a refreshingly grounded discussion about DePINed’s tokenomics, Julian explained how the company built its own stablecoin mechanism to fix a common problem: price volatility of native tokens. “You buy $1,000 worth of tokens, and tomorrow it’s worth $800,” he said. “That’s not how businesses operate.”
To fix this, DePINed designed a model where users buy the native DEPIN token, burn it to mint a USDC-backed stablecoin, and then use that stablecoin to access services like GPU rentals or AI APIs. That burning process reduces supply, driving value back to the original token. It’s simple, elegant, and exactly the kind of mechanism the Web3 space needs more of—one where the token is not the product, but a utility layer beneath the product.
Julian doesn’t stop there. He wants to tokenize not just usage, but contribution. His platform allows users to onboard their own computing resources into the DePINed cloud, tokenize them, and earn rewards for servicing other builders. In his view, every user is also a node in a broader creator economy.
“The next generation of children, or like I guess our next generation of whatever entrepreneurs, they’re going to be self-sufficient in terms of launching their own startups 100% of themselves. And we see this actually with history, because if you look 20 years ago, you’re in the dot com bubble, right? It would take you $75,000 to launch a website.”
Founders Are No Longer Fundraisers—They’re Builders with Leverage
Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Julian Au is how much he resists conventional founder tropes. He didn’t raise millions before launching DePINed. He self-funded the infrastructure by building other products for clients, proving viability before ever pitching a deck.
“we didn’t really need to raise money to kind of build up an MVP for it or etc. And it was really good for us actually,” he said.
“In my previous ventures, I like going into a conversation with leverage,”
That leverage came from DePINed having real customers, real usage, and real APIs—all before talking to VCs. “We were oversubscribed by 8x,” he noted, referencing their token raise. “But now we’re giving people very small tickets, just to control who gets in.”
It’s a striking inversion of the old fundraising script. Instead of a founder begging for capital with an idea, Julian positioned himself as a platform owner vetting which capital gets access to his traction.
This approach is not just smart—it’s essential. As Julian pointed out, the Web3 market is no longer rewarding just ideas or vision decks. “You’re not competing against other startups,” he said. “You’re competing against meme coins that go to 100 million in a week.” To survive that, you need real value. Real users. Real reasons for a token to exist.
The Takeaway: Builders Who Learn Fast, Build Fast—and Don’t Wait
Julian’s entrepreneurial journey—from building a Raspberry Pi cloud streamer at age 20 to powering infrastructure for 50+ AI startups—exemplifies a core truth about where we’re headed. The founder of tomorrow isn’t a suit with a pitch deck. She’s a hacker with ChatGPT open in one tab, Render in another, and a DAO governance dashboard on the third.
And this isn’t just a philosophical shift—it’s a structural one.
With platforms like DePINed providing computing, APIs, marketing distribution, and even on-chain incentives, we’re seeing the rise of solo, AI-powered, token-aware founders who move faster than venture capital ever could.
Julian Au isn’t just building for this future. He is this future. And if he’s right, we’re entering a world where a thousand solo founders can launch billion-dollar protocols—not by raising money, but by removing every friction between idea and execution.
In his words:
“The objective of using emerging technology is to improve people’s lives… There’s a lot of people in web two, right? So how do we utilize web three technology, which is the efficiency of transactions, efficiency of tokenizing and allocating resources.”
And the next billion-dollar founder? They’re probably building alone.
