What's Different about “Unicorns”
foundersatwork.posthaven.com
foundersatwork.posthaven.com
Almost all the CEO/Founders that speak of deep purpose have arrived via a strong path of revisionist history.
I'm the founder of two large tech companies and the way that it goes is that most founders have an idea that is driven by some vague desire to solve something or test something. What ends up happening is that as the idea grows you are forced to recruit people and money. As you are forced to tell the story of your company, you workshop the emotional parts to become more effective in resonating with your audience. By the time you are raising even an "A round" your story is extremely polished and emotionally moving.
I must add this is almost never done with manipulative intent or dishonesty. The mere act of becoming an orbit as the company grows demands persuasion at ever level.
The story of purpose is heightened by the success, it does not create it.
The reality is that by the time a founder has even entered the door of a VC, the persuasion is perfected to an incredibly obsessive level by necessity and through trial and error. It's to a point where even the founder starts seeing their own revisionist history as actual history...because there's really no other option. There's nothing wrong with this - it's extremely rational and a normal consequence of the environment. When you pitch that often and craft your story that often of course you will buy into it more and more over time regardless of the extent to which you bought into it initially.
It's really the attempt to understand this phenomenon from the wrong vantage point that is flawed - as you pointed out.
Then perhaps there's something wrong with the environment.
That fact is not mutually exclusive to having integrity or living a thoughtful life though.
Brand loyalty, religion, patriotism, hiring/onboarding, romantic relationships, and therapy are all other systems that work according to this principle. So is the expression "fake it till you make it" - at some point, you cease to be faking it.
[1] "Vision" is another term that's like this. Most (successful) entrepreneurs don't start their companies with a grand vision of what they want to accomplish. Rather, they start with a tiny need that tickles them. And then as they continue working on it, the need gets more distinct, they need to enlist more people to help, and eventually this tiny feeling gets massaged into a very big, very concrete vision that's effective at getting people to buy in.
it seems you agree with her. to be fair, she may have mentioned that in a different part of the conference so it's not explicitly spelled out in the post, which was her opening keynote.
You described a terrible behavior with nefast consequencies, most of the times. Plain old Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.
As though you've somehow failed by succeeding. By finishing what you set out to do before actually dying.
Want to know what success really looks like? Watch this video of Fred Pattachia retiring from professional surfing mid-season, mid-contest, mid-heat, after scoring a perfect 10 point ride and knowing that he'd accomplished everything he wanted from the sport. He just high fived the other guy in the water and caught a wave in to the beach with 10 minutes left in the heat (that he still technically won):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqzNpXcCJnc
For me, that's way more inspirational than what Jessica is talking about in the article. A guy in his 30s, recognizing that he just completed his "Life's Work", and deciding on the spot to move on to the next thing.
The question is, is the chosen field 'incomplete' or 'complete'. If the entrepreneurs goals is just to cash a check then his chosen task can be completed. If it's 'bring X to market and let others finish it' likewise. On the other hand, if the business becomes the entrepeneurs baby and they just want to nurture it I'm not sure if that path is necessarily ever complete.
this is actually a pretty common phenomenon:
Do VC's even think from a new start-up perspective? Why is there so much chasm between what they think and what really is for startups on ground?
I am running a start-up and my time is split between customer support , managing my team, forming partnership ( which Jessica didn't want to) , developing ML code, creating roadmaps and attempting to talk to VC's
Partnership with Intel is how I got a free deep learning machine on cloud, partnership with IBM got me business contacts to network.
And there is this fanatic obsession of ARR.
Honestly, as an upcoming startup we would have been long dead if we had listened to any typical advice from VC firm. One of the first question from Sequoia partner was about ARR although we are growing and I explained we are focused on almost zero churn rate as customer data is more important than his money for our ML.
Are we missing anything?
The entire startup scene is a survivorship bias of only select "life work" samples that happen to align with the ability to monetize it. And even though some of the above examples might be productized for others, building a business is a completely separate dream than that of the personal accomplishment. There's more people pursuing the latter dream than the former.
EDIT: I moved this comment up to a top level thread:
Zuckerburg's genius was in realizing that Facebook wasn't just a hobby, it could actually be a huge business.
Zuck's genius is his execution ability and making a prime product combined withthe exclusivity of elite Universities. He was also on CNBC in 2004 so that combination of skill and Harvard created a grand opportunity.
Surely people thought easy social networks would be a big business -- MySpace and AOL proved that. Of course, no one could had reasonably predicted it'd be as big as it is.
At the time, real names were not commonly used online. That coupled with very real 'stalkability' of how FB was used at universities made it much stickier than others. Embedding a "relationship" function into the same software as your "class schedule" was bizarre - but apparently very effective social manipulation. Having in-class life so closely linked with social-life as well as daily preferences and even vacation pictures really embedded itself into a social nerve in a way any network designed with a more singular goal in mind really would not have.
There are people today who think my fake Facebook surname is actually my real surname. I'm considering changing my real surname to match my fake Facebook name.
For what it's worth, the Winkelvoss twins came up with exactly this business plan. Maybe his genius was to steal it.
The truth is, he executed the shit out of a scalable idea, and he had the vision to see it through many orders of magnitude growth. The idea that there was some master plan is just silly, his success, like most big companies was iterating over time and making a series of successful bets.
In the early days it was more MySpace-like, and the parts that weren't were very much like LiveJournal. The UI was much better though.
Without hindsight, nothing about facebook was novel. It had less to do with Zuckerberg's intellectual capacity and more to do with luck, capital and network effects.
Why? 'Billion dollar' is just an arbitrary target. Why not focus on more $500M women founded companies?
Also, there is a push to increase the labor supply of programmers to drive down labor costs and the largest untapped source of software dev labor is women. This is just a side effect of trying to increase women programmers: an increase in women programmer founders.
Uber was this so call Unicorn.
These analyst of what's a unicorn or not is more closer to horoscope than to real data analysis.