A researcher built a dataset of 39 billion-dollar companies to find patterns. Unicorn founders were typically in their 30s or 40s with co-founding teams, not solo operators. The speaker coined the term "unicorn" to describe these rare startups.
After I had started Cowboy, I had a $40 million fund and no investments. And I was talking— I wanted to try and make the best investments possible out of the fund that I had raised. And I went and talked to lots of smart investors, many of whom have spoken in this room, and smart LPs, the investors in our funds, about like, tell me about some of the best funds in history. What were the companies— was it 1 company or 3 companies or 5 companies in the fund that made the breakout and what did those companies have in common? And everything was anecdotal and there was surprisingly no data. Back then in 2012 and 2013, there was no PitchBook, there was no CrunchBase, there was no CB Insights, there was no The Information. And so there was like billions of dollars invested by VC firms every year and no analysis. And so I started basically making a spreadsheet. And I started making a list of companies that were less than 10 years old that had become worth more than $1 billion either in the public or private markets. And just collecting basically information about how many founders were there, when were the founders born, and how old were they when they founded the company, where did they go to college, what did they do before school— before starting the company, where did they work, how did they know each other, what was the original idea, how much money did they raise, all these different things. And so I basically created a dataset of 39 companies that had been born within the past 10 years that were worth over $1 billion, and they actually had quite a few things in common. One of the things at the time was when I was taking pitch meetings from founders, sometimes founders would walk in the door and they'd be like, hey, so we started this company and I know like I'm really old to have started this company because I'm 35, I'm sorry. And I didn't want those people to— when you did look at the analysis, the companies in the unicorn dataset were founded by people in their 30s and 40s. They were not founded by 20-year-old dropouts from Harvard. But at the time, there was like this feeling among the entrepreneurial community that if you haven't started your company by the time you've finished college, you're not going to make it. And the other thing was teams, that co-founding teams generally were the vast majority of the dataset because it's hard to be a solo founder. And so I think there were a bunch of insights that I found from the dataset that I basically wrote up in this blog post called Welcome to the Unicorn Club. The unicorn word was one that I didn't have that until the end. So I basically had this very long phrase that was billion-dollar companies founded in the last 10 years that were either public or private and venture-backed. And you can't really write that many times in an essay. It's not very readable. And so I did this find and replace, and I was substituting like monster hit or Godzilla or home run, and I would reread the piece piece with the different phrases, and then I put in unicorn, because I wanted something that was more fun and more mystical and made it seem more magical and more elusive and more special, not kind of like business analysisy. And unicorn just made the whole thing much easier to read. And so that's what I posted. And I honestly did not expect anyone to read it. So it's quite overwhelming that it's still a thing, actually.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
