Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

Born as Unicorns: The Changing Nature of Startups

15 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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1:02

Precursor Ventures examines why some startups launch directly as unicorns and how investor perception of founders and co-investors shapes deal valuations. The video explores the gap between frontier research labs and traditional startups in how LPs evaluate risk and potential.

Chapters

I think right now, if I said, what's more valuable to you as a fund manager, a company that is performing well that no one's heard of, or a company that is well known where no one has any idea if it will work, I would argue right now you get much more credit for being in a frontier research lab where nobody knows what the product is, but that the founders are noteworthy. And, you know, some of these companies are unicorns from day one because They start life at a billion-dollar valuation and you're like, oh, I'm this unicorn. I'm like, well, yeah, you invested at a billion dollars. Like it wasn't like you wrote it up. You invested a billion. Born as a unicorn. It was born unicorn, a bornicorn or whatever you want to call it. And I think we have companies in our portfolio that are doing great, but they're either off theme, off trend, or the other investors in that cap table are not noteworthy. And I meet with LPs and they're like, oh, that's interesting. And then I'll tell them, oh, this other company we have, I have many questions about it, but it has these fancy investors as co-investors, and it has these fancy founders with these great backgrounds.