> Rather than being treated as rare phenomenal outliers, these unicorn companies are a necessity for venture capital funds to be successful. So when a startup t

> Rather than being treated as rare phenomenal outliers, these unicorn companies are a necessity for venture capital funds to be successful. So when a startup takes those venture dollars, they are almost always going for a big exit, or they’ll be pressured by their investors to hyper-growth their way toward one. Extreme risk, extreme reward. To expand on this: Venture capitalists are incentivized, by the nature of how they invest, to drive companies towards becoming unicorns and attempting the extreme-risk-extreme-reward scenario. If you put $10M towards a company, and it says "Great, we're stable and our employees are happy and productive and we're building the cool thing we wanted to build and we're about to get enough sales to break even" and it doesn't hire or grow, the investors won't see the $10M back for a very long time. That scenario is only slightly financially better than the company shutting down, and in practice, given that the investor needs to keep thinking about the company, being on its board, etc., it's not worth having that distraction. So even if your company would be successful, if it's VC-funded, it's going to get pushed to be either hyper-successful or to fail. And even if it's hyper-successful, it will probably experience mission drift. Early employees at Tiny Speck who wanted to build a neat MMORPG are probably very financially happy with Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, but all that remains of Glitch is a 404 page. (Read their shutdown announcement: https://www.glitchthegame.com/closing/ https://www.glitchthegame.com/closing/) So if you're going into the startup because you're mission-driven instead of profit-driven, remember that the people who decide your mission are ultimately profit-driven.