Show HN: What unicorns have in common – Lessons from a VC

I'm Igor Ryabenkiy, an author, serial entrepreneur, and venture investor. Over the past couple decades, I've backed 400+ startups, including early-stage bets on Miro, Deel, Turing, OpenWeb, PandaDoc, and others.

After watching even the strongest teams fail from distraction and drift, I started documenting what I saw work across the best ones. That eventually turned into a book: Unicorn Focus: The Key to Building Billion-Dollar Startups in the Age of AI.

It’s a tactical field guide on how to pick one idea worth building, how to define one core feature and message, how to avoid wasting time on things that don’t move the needle. I’ve included lessons from my own wins and mistakes, plus insights from founders I’ve backed: Andrey Khusid (Miro), Jonathan Siddharth (Turing), Nadav Shoval (OpenWeb), and others.

I’m sharing a free chapter here. Would love to hear what resonates or what you disagree with. Always open to feedback.

The full book is now live on Amazon (just search Unicorn Focus if you're curious).