There is a lot of talk in entrepreneurship, VC, and tech tethered to the unicorn, in polarized ways. On one side, the unicorn as a superstar, and more recently on the other side, as a supernova in the fallout of an ominous tech bubble.
I’m not really interested in either making unicorn businesses an object of fetish nor do I profoundly trouble myself with the sustainability of Dropbox.
However, I do want to dig into what psychological effect the concept of the unicorn has on entrepreneurs when it occupies a benchmark for success. At least how I see it, tech entrepreneurs aspire to create unicorn businesses in the same way middle school basketball players dream of playing in the NBA.
What I’ve also observed with others, and experienced first hand, is the desire to build a unicorn at the cost of building a profitable business first. In drama as in life, this is what one calls tragic irony.
My contention is that there are a lot of profitable business ideas that are squashed, by entrepreneurs and VC's alike, due to their lack of unicorn potential. That's a damn shame. Maybe successful innovation begins by stepping outside of predetermined benchmarks of success, and strives to materialize its own definition of success-- customer by customer, product by product, dollar by dollar...