A YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin (uploaded July 12, 2024) that challenges myths about unicorn companies and shares early-stage lessons from HubSpot. The speaker recounts meeting Brian Halligan at MIT and warns against assuming that a unicorn’s past actions or advice are universally applicable; he also frames startup success statistically (e.g., claiming SaaS success probability ~1%).
And it's a myth that unicorns, just because they were successful, that everything they did was smart and everything they say since having become unicorns is right and true and applicable to all people, it's just simply not true. Unicorns don't crap out universally applicable advice. So all that aside, so going back to when HubSpot kind of first started, I met this guy, Brian Halligan, who's the founder and CEO of HubSpot. We met in grad school at MIT. And there was kind of one problem with Brian, and the problem is that he was in business school working towards an mba. Now, some of you may be like, well, why is that a problem? It's like lots of people get MBAs. And it's because the conventional wisdom in the startup world was and still is. I'll explain by way of this formula. So let's assume the probability of success for a SaaS company is roughly 1%.
