Artificial intelligence now turns the lone founder into a credible rival to the corporation, and the steady salaried job into a riskier bet. In February 2025 Maor Shlomo, a programmer in Tel Aviv, put online a side project called Base44, an app that builds working software from instructions typed in plain English. Within a month it had earned close to 1.5 million US dollars. Word spread on LinkedIn rather than through any advertising, and the us…