What defines "start-up"?
Take go-pro, they're a product company that had huge success with a hit product. They successfully re-invested to keep that product business successful and the business grew to 1bn.
Does unicorn just mean non-publically traded company worth > 1bn?
How is it that Avast is still a "startup" when it was founded in 1988?
I mean.. they were founded even before the dot com bubble!
Edit: I know there's always a problem when trying to define what is and isn't a startup...but by all metrics I could think, Avast isn't one of them. I mean, otherwise we would also need to include the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon as other unicorn startups, no?
Because of the way the equity markets have been recently, there's not a clear path to becoming a unicorn without hitting most of the other markets we tend to think of as startup-y: VC-backed, high growth, scalable into a big market.
Also, while Avast grew into a billion-dollar company via a very rapid growth spurt it took them 20 years to get to the start of that spurt.
Either validate: - innovative business model
- product
- market
- ...
It usually boils down to businesses that still didn't find a repeatable growth channel (that scales).