7 ms·

What's Different about “Unicorns”

91 points by runesoerensen 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mattmanser 9y ago
Being around at the time, working on a site for a 1000 students at one college in 2004 actually did sound pretty cool.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
      - jackgolding 9y ago
        Very interesting point, I do recall in 2005-2007 most friends not using any names for Bebo/Myspace
      - bdamm 9y ago
        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.
    - eggie 9y ago
      > Zuck's genius is his execution ability and making a prime product combined withthe exclusivity of elite Universities. For what it's worth, the Winkelvoss twins came up with exactly this business plan. Maybe his genius was to steal it.
  - rudimental 9y ago
    He'd tell you he didn't realize that until very late: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-in-imperfect-is-perfect/id1227971746?i=1000385757506&mt=5 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/facebooks-mark-zuckerber...
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Zuckerburg's genius was realizing he could be famous off a better implementation of someone else's idea. He eventually started making money on it, too. This is a recurring pattern in technology.
    - dasil003 9y ago
      Whose idea did he copy? TheFacebook was nothing like Friendster or MySpace, it came from a completely different angle. Also, why do you assume he wanted to be famous, or had some realization about how to be successful? 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.
      - nickpsecurity 9y ago
        Let's start with Winklevoss Twins and early employees that might have given him an idea or two.
      - lmm 9y ago
        > TheFacebook was nothing like Friendster or MySpace, it came from a completely different angle. 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.
    - a_imho 9y ago
      This is clear case of survival bias. We had social networks way before facebook, I remember using one in 2002 and it took many years until a mass user exodus to facebook. 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.
forumSlider 9y ago
What a surprise.
oh_sigh 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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.
mangofoobar 9y ago
More women at oil rigs, coal mines, and trucking. It is way over male dominated and it is about time we get equal representation of the sexes in field's like that. Oh, wait. They only want equal representation in cushy office programming jobs.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
poletopole 9y ago
Finding your life's work is the hardest part I think. Once you solve that the rest is easy.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  I never understood why the term "life's work" tends to be singular. There's something defeatist to it.
  - jasonkester 9y ago
    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
- white-flame 9y ago
  If your life's work & passion is to have the perfect collection of beach rocks, or to get rid of every social nuisance you perceive, or to catalog your old storage unit full of family photographs, etc, none of that makes any of the rest of life easy. 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.
bksenior 9y ago
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.
- thiswonthurt 9y ago
  for smaller companies, this also happens in the sales process when customers want to know the history of your company. emotional embellishments happen.
- askafriend 9y ago
  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 9y ago
jasonkester 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- ryanx435 9y ago
  > As though you've somehow failed by succeeding. By finishing what you set out to do before actually dying. this is actually a pretty common phenomenon: https://hbr.org/2012/02/the-catastrophe-of-success https://hbr.org/2012/02/the-catastrophe-of-success
lngnmn 9y ago
So much of institutional investor's money that all inevitable mistakes and gliches could be quickly and quetly (and costly) fixed.
lazybreather 9y ago
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.
ThomPete 9y ago
Perfect timing i.e. luck.
digitalzombie 9y ago
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.
ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
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?

91 points by runesoerensen 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mattmanser 9y ago

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

nostrademons 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - jackgolding 9y ago
      Very interesting point, I do recall in 2005-2007 most friends not using any names for Bebo/Myspace
    - bdamm 9y ago
      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.
  - eggie 9y ago
    > Zuck's genius is his execution ability and making a prime product combined withthe exclusivity of elite Universities. For what it's worth, the Winkelvoss twins came up with exactly this business plan. Maybe his genius was to steal it.
- rudimental 9y ago
  He'd tell you he didn't realize that until very late: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-in-imperfect-is-perfect/id1227971746?i=1000385757506&mt=5 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/facebooks-mark-zuckerber...
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Zuckerburg's genius was realizing he could be famous off a better implementation of someone else's idea. He eventually started making money on it, too. This is a recurring pattern in technology.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    Whose idea did he copy? TheFacebook was nothing like Friendster or MySpace, it came from a completely different angle. Also, why do you assume he wanted to be famous, or had some realization about how to be successful? 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.
    - nickpsecurity 9y ago
      Let's start with Winklevoss Twins and early employees that might have given him an idea or two.
    - lmm 9y ago
      > TheFacebook was nothing like Friendster or MySpace, it came from a completely different angle. 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.
  - a_imho 9y ago
    This is clear case of survival bias. We had social networks way before facebook, I remember using one in 2002 and it took many years until a mass user exodus to facebook. 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.

forumSlider 9y ago

What a surprise.

oh_sigh 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
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.

mangofoobar 9y ago

More women at oil rigs, coal mines, and trucking. It is way over male dominated and it is about time we get equal representation of the sexes in field's like that. Oh, wait. They only want equal representation in cushy office programming jobs.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

poletopole 9y ago

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

skrebbel 9y ago
I never understood why the term "life's work" tends to be singular. There's something defeatist to it.
- jasonkester 9y ago
  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
white-flame 9y ago
If your life's work & passion is to have the perfect collection of beach rocks, or to get rid of every social nuisance you perceive, or to catalog your old storage unit full of family photographs, etc, none of that makes any of the rest of life easy. 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.

bksenior 9y ago

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.

thiswonthurt 9y ago
for smaller companies, this also happens in the sales process when customers want to know the history of your company. emotional embellishments happen.
askafriend 9y ago
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 9y ago

jasonkester 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
ryanx435 9y ago
> As though you've somehow failed by succeeding. By finishing what you set out to do before actually dying. this is actually a pretty common phenomenon: https://hbr.org/2012/02/the-catastrophe-of-success https://hbr.org/2012/02/the-catastrophe-of-success

lngnmn 9y ago

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

lazybreather 9y ago

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.

ThomPete 9y ago

Perfect timing i.e. luck.

digitalzombie 9y ago

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.

ganeshkrishnan 9y ago

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?