In this interview, Dom Einhorn outlines his firm’s investment criteria and the operational model of his accelerator, Unicorn. He explains that deals are first screened by a CFA for financial soundness, then evaluated for proof of concept, early traction (even a small personal investment), and product‑market fit, which he gauges through search volume data in the App Store or Google depending on the product’s platform. Competition is not avoided per se; a healthy level validates market demand, while excessive vanity competitors signal a weak problem statement. The primary moat he values is timing and rapid time‑to‑market, not patents. Unicorn’s accelerator runs a short, aggressive program—3 to 6 months—covering legal, accounting, workflow training, and a push to launch a beta MVP. A key validation technique is pre‑selling the product to secure early customers before heavy development. When discussing where startups should launch, Einhorn favors France (citing the French Tech ecosystem and visa programs), Estonia (fast company formation), Singapore, Canada, and mentions Macedonia for low‑cost talent, while dismissing Israel for geopolitical reasons. He also describes his rural incubator in Zala, Hungary, noting that COVID accelerated founder migration away from big cities to low‑cost, high‑quality locations, boosting lead flow dramatically. The conversation blends practical investment filters with strategic advice on geography and accelerator design.
Chapters
What's the typical criteria? Someone's coming to you, and they're saying, you know, I want to be a founder, I want to be a— or maybe I'm at the early stage, I have an idea. You said, you know, you only go up until seed stage, Series A. Can you tell us about what's your investment criteria look like? What are you looking for and what are you avoiding when you're investing in a startup?
Yeah, very good questions. I think first and foremost, our in-house CFA, who I've been working with for upwards of 20 years, vets the deal from a financial perspective and then decides whether to pass it on to me personally or to someone else or to nobody at all, depending on how it checks out. Assuming it comes across my desk, the first thing I look for is, our ability to accelerate what's already in motion.
Okay.
So we only work with startups that have at least a proof of concept, right? Be it a product or a service. And if they're looking to raise more money, show us at least that you've been able to convince your grandmother to write you a check, no matter how small, right?
Right.
So you have some kind of like, you know, litmus tests there, some early checks. Obviously, you wanna make sure that the founding team is who you want them to be. You wanna make sure there is product-market fit. Typically, the way we assess product-market fit in our space is merely by volume of searches compared to what is currently on the market and whether or not the demand that's already looking for that specific product or service is actually validated by keyword volume, specifically in the App Store. Okay.
So this is not Google. You're looking at apps only specifically.
Not necessarily. It could be Google search volume. It could be App Store search volume, depending on what the model dictates. You know, if it's a cross-platform model, we will look at both. If it's only mobile, we're looking at that. If it's only iOS, no Android yet, we're starting with that. In other words, instead of building something in the hopes that it will come, we typically know they're coming and that's the reason why we're building it, right?
Mm-hmm.
So when we iterate as well, very often, that's obviously something I would recommend everybody here to do, is because what we see very often are teams of developers building a product or service in isolation. Not knowing that it's been built already or that someone else is building it.
Sure.
Now, clearly, we don't have a crystal ball. You don't know what other teams are doing, but you at least need to make sure that what you're trying to build and putting your effort towards hasn't been done already, which quite often, you know, be honest, random search, 10, 15 seconds, you already find a competitor. And then they kind of roll their eyes and say, oh, it's not exactly like what we're doing. You know the talk.
So you're looking for companies that have zero competition. Is that what you're saying?
Something more? I'm not saying zero competition. What I'm, what I'm saying is that, because if we're looking back and I've been around the block now for 28 years in this space, and I'd say when I was an entrepreneur, it was expensive to launch a digital business in 1998. If you wanted to launch an e-commerce website, you needed to have an Oracle server license, which puts you back $25,000 to $32,000 US. In 1999, my bandwidth bill every month, I used 800 times less bandwidth than today and I paid $8,000 a month just for bandwidth back then.
Right.
So unless you raised a quarter million, half a million, $1 million, you had no point being in business because your burn rate was way too high. Fast forward 28 years, all those costs have literally been eliminated. So you can launch a business instantly with your smartphone if you want to do so. But what a lot of people tend to forget is because of this rapid democratization and demonetization of this process. Anyone can become your competitor. And even though very often, obviously having more competition in the marketplace tends to validate what it is you're working on, because clearly if they can actually sell the product or service, there is a ready market there.
Exactly.
What I see a lot of startups do is underestimate the amount of competition that there is out there. That's a big difference.
Right?
A good amount of healthy competition validates what you're doing. An overwhelming amount of competition— because what happens if you can start a business instantly at almost no cost? What you're seeing is a lot of vanity businesses being created that don't really address a bona fide problem in the marketplace, and you're not really providing a solution. You're actually creating the problem while creating the solution at the same time.
So it sounds like, you know, you're talking about barrier to entry, right? And what's your kind of moat that, or your, what's your value prop that sticks, that keeps you ahead of the competition out there? So if you have something that's a lot more valuable, you know, 5, 10 times better, or something that's a lot more difficult to replicate, then I think it makes more sense, right?
Without a doubt. And I think the moat that, you know, clearly for the right, assuming there is right product-market fit, is clearly timing. and time to market, right? Don't come to us and say, look, we want to file some patents for the next 3 or 4 years because I've already tuned out, right?
Yeah.
You know, so we're looking at having a direct measurable impact as an accelerator. We have 2 components inside of Unicorn. We have the early incubation stage, which heavily revolves around legal structures, accounting, proper workflow, and really teaching the entrepreneur how to work efficiently. And then assuming everything checks out, you graduate from that stage. The acceleration part is handled internally as well, and it's very, very aggressive. Typically you incubate for 3, maximum 6 months, ideally 3, and then you have at least a beta version of your product, an MVP that's ready to go to market. And the idea is to validate that as quickly as possible, see if you can get traction. And usually what I tell, you know, especially service-based businesses, and I know you guys are SaaS fans, So I'm gonna like hammer that in specifically.
Sure.
What we typically try to do, you know, and it's not specifically, you know, towards SaaS founders right now, but if you're launching a product or service prior to allocating a lot of resources internally, what we do is we take the concept of what we're looking to build and we're trying to pre-sell it to clients so that if the value proposition is really that strong, you should have at least some clients, some people are willing to take a crap shot at that and say, you know what? This is so exciting. This product is really what we need. We're actually willing to pre-purchase it in the hopes that you will bring it to market. And that really gives you solid validation before you actually go out there and really spend a lot of time, effort, and resources towards building that product or service.
Makes perfect sense. In your opinion, what do you think are some of the best places, countries, or jurisdictions for startups to launch? Obviously, maybe you're biased towards being in France and where you are living.
Highly biased. Yeah, highly biased, but it's an intellectual bias and an emotional bias at the same time. So I'd say, first of all, I've worked in at least 30 different countries in the last 28 years. Clearly, what drove me early on in my career was the US. I worked in Latin America, in Central America, in other parts of Europe. And everybody has their opinion on that. So clearly I'm going to be subjective about what I'm going to be saying. We as a team did a lot of research in 2017 prior to deciding on France, and we had 4 or 5 candidate countries in which we wanted to settle, and we ended up settling on France after Emmanuel Macron became president of France and radically changed the landscape for startups, coined the term, English term for France, the startup nation, created the French Tech label, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would challenge anyone today into a debate as to which country has done the most and is offering the most for early-stage startups, and I would challenge them and probably come out a winner. I'm a former fighter, so either way I'm gonna win. But in this case—
What were the 4 countries before I, before I say that, what were the 4 or 5 countries that are on your list?
So in Europe, you definitely need to look at Estonia, right? Very proactive. Everything is decentralized. You can create a company within 45 minutes, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're looking to raise money, there's always gonna be, oh, former Yugoslavia for those of us who are old enough, right? Question mark, right? Small country. If you're building something for the Estonian market, can you really scale it across Europe first, then the rest of the world? That's an issue. I would say even a small country like Macedonia, 2 million people, right? Very proactive, highly skilled engineers coming out of top engineering schools at a low cost, which is important.
Yeah.
But all things considered, France is a sizable market, 67, 68 million people. It is the second largest economy in the EU zone. It has tremendous startup incentives. If you look up French tech investor visa, you have talent passport visas. For example, it took me 2 weeks to get my Panamanian engineers to France, quote unquote import them. The day they came, the next day the kids were in school. They were still jet-lagged. They came with 5 kids, 3 and 2. So a lot of the barriers of entry, because if I mention anyone to the US right now or Canada, you have to go to France, they're going to say, oh, the French bureaucracy, et cetera, et cetera. To a certain extent, that is still true. Nowhere near as much as it used to be. And what we do internally at Unicorn, we take care of it all. So you don't have to worry about it. We hand you the keys. Here's your desk. Get to work.
Very nice. So Estonia, France, what were the other 2? I don't think you mentioned them.
In Europe or around the world?
Wherever. What were the ones you were considering?
In Asia, Singapore.
Asia, Singapore.
Okay. Definitely high rated. I mean, I think US, Canada, neck to neck. If I had a choice today, I would probably go to Canada, to your place versus the US.
Nice.
Right, for a number of reasons, including immigration, and why not?
Okay. Have you considered Israel? Tel Aviv? Was that on your list or no?
No. A lot of clients there, a lot of partners there. Definitely an exciting place as well. I think I would stay away for geopolitical reasons.
Nice. Yeah, fair enough. And what would you— so you mentioned, you know, that time period between where you were considering France, but this was in 2017. How does that change now? How do you think that landscape will look like in the near future?
So interesting. Obviously what we've seen with COVID is, at least for us, it's truly accelerated the pace because keep in mind that we're in a small rural area. We are in a town, Zala, S-A-L-A-T, for those of you who want to look it up. 9,000 people in the winter, 2 million tourists a year. So it's a very unique place, medieval town. that we chose by design to set up the first incubator in a rural area. We're about to become the largest rural incubator in the world of its kind. And so we made that decision before COVID because we saw some early trends and market research indicated at that time that roughly 12% of startup founders were looking to relocate away from big cities into smaller towns like this one.
Right. Okay, I speak on camera.
Exactly, low cost of living. Yeah, correct, low cost of living, 50 times less rent costs than in London on a scale. If you're a startup entrepreneur and you're raising money, that probably should be a concern of yours. Easy access to great engineering talent, beautiful universities in Bordeaux and Toulouse. You can look them up online. Some of the best universities in the tech space are in France. What else? Oh, the fact that we are rural and COVID, right? As soon as COVID hit, our lead flow literally tripled, then quintupled. Now we're getting 50 to 70 requests a day.
Wow.
From people in London, in New York, in Madrid, which is not too far away from where we are in the south of France, other cities in France. I'm sick and tired of being in Paris. I'm sick and tired of being in London, right? I don't know, I can't breathe anymore. You hear it all. And so, COVID accelerated that pace in our favor towards a more rural area. And it's a pristine rural area, right? In a 25-mile radius, we have 1,001 medieval castles. You got rivers, you got water rafting, you got rock climbing, mountain biking, you name it.
Yeah.
So, if you want to work hard in the morning and go do your thing in the afternoon or vice versa, You know, this is your place. Thank you.
