
What's Different about “Unicorns” - runesoerensen
http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/whats-different-about-unicorns
======
bksenior
She and the majority of investors that write about founders have the "company
purpose" thing backwards.

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.

~~~
askafriend
I think you nailed it, and that's why vantage points matter. Sitting from a
VC's vantage point, it seems like every successful founder who comes through
the door to pitch you has a deep sense of purpose.

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.

~~~
isoskeles
> There's nothing wrong with this - it's extremely rational and a normal
> consequence of the environment.

Then perhaps there's something wrong with the environment.

~~~
bksenior
Not really, you are a Pavlovian animal in every aspect of your life. Everyone
is.

That fact is not mutually exclusive to having integrity or living a thoughtful
life though.

------
jasonkester
I have an issue with this quote from the article "If you sell your life's
work, then what are you supposed to do?"

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](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.

~~~
fsloth
Any 'important' field is infinitely deep and never allows one to accomplish
everything because no one knows what there is yet to achieve. A physicist does
not quit just because they recieve a nobel price, for instance - "Ok, I've
contributed all I wanted to contribute".

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.

------
ganeshkrishnan
After reading the previous article in which Jessica mentions "grabbing coffee
with investors" as waste of time, I am conflicted. Most VC and angels advise
to form personal relationship and yet here I am being advised against.

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?

------
poletopole
Finding your life's work is the hardest part I think. Once you solve that the
rest is easy.

~~~
skrebbel
I never understood why the term "life's work" tends to be singular. There's
something defeatist to it.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed.

EDIT: I moved this comment up to a top level thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669273](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669273)

------
mattmanser
Being around at the time, working on a site for a 1000 students at one college
in 2004 actually did sound pretty cool.

~~~
nostrademons
I was actually working on a site for 1000 students at one college in 2004
(Amherst had its own social network for students, 3 years before Facebook, and
it still exists). It sounded and was pretty cool, but the thing is - nobody
working on it thought that it could possibly be a business. It was just this
student-run club that we'd have some fun with while avoiding our homework and
then forget about once we got jobs.

Zuckerburg's genius was in realizing that Facebook wasn't just a hobby, it
could actually be a huge business.

~~~
gsoty
A friend I was working with in 2004 also ran a social network for North
Carolina State University. The difference was (and is) that it was just an
online bullentin board system.

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.

~~~
toufka
Don't forget another big differentiator of FB from a bunch of others at the
same time was having a few (accidental? intentional?) very dark psychological
patterns.

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.

~~~
bdamm
I still remember with complete clarity the shock when Facebook posted my "real
name" publicly. No website had done that before. I was glad to have used a
fake surname.

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.

------
lngnmn
So much of institutional investor's money that all inevitable mistakes and
gliches could be quickly and quetly (and costly) fixed.

------
oh_sigh
> Now we’ve got to focus on the next target: more women-founded billion dollar
> companies.

Why? 'Billion dollar' is just an arbitrary target. Why not focus on more $500M
women founded companies?

~~~
ryanx435
Value signalling.

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.

------
lazybreather
When someone asks you to reread an advice they gave long time ago.. He/She
lost me at that. Even if it is Jessica Livingston.

------
digitalzombie
It's all bull.

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.

------
ThomPete
Perfect timing i.e. luck.

