Unicorn or bust? The struggle between going for it all, or achieving consistent progress.

Mick Jagger walks up to the stage, a handsome stutter in his step and accompanied by his fellow rockstar bandmates. This was the scene in the ’60s, ’70s, and so forth. Rock bands like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles took over the world from their small English homesteads.

Every girl wanted to date the band members, and every guy wanted to be the band member. A perfect storm.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and rock music had inevitably left the scope of popular culture. But western civilisation was still looking for the thing that would engage the minds of the youth, excite millions of people across the globe and stick it to their parents.

That thing was tech. Start-ups became the rock bands of the 2000s and 2010s, and start-up founders became rock stars.

Facebook could be compared to Led Zeppelin, Uber could be compared to The Rolling Stones and Snapchat could be compared to The Beatles. Zuckerberg was the new Lennon, and Speigel the new Jagger.

But how did this occur? The current state of the start-up world across the world has been carefully curated to lure its new entrants into a false sense of perceived achievability. Firstly, internet companies, post the bubble of 99' had slowly begun to recover. Companies such as Facebook and Google had established themselves as the “real deal” amongst the range of copycat operators. These companies began to search for how to expand their internet empires from just social media and search to a range of different verticals. That’s where the founders came into the equation. During this period of the early 10s, the media was filled with news of companies such as YouTube and Instagram being acquired for over $1 Billion dollars, following multi-million-dollar rounds of VC funding. The narrative of the young entrepreneur striking it big with a start-up from their garage had infiltrated the narrative within a whole new demographic of young people.

The stream of media became even more prevalent as we entered the period of “app domination” during the 10s. It seemed, like the .com bubble, that anyone with an app could strike it big and reach a coveted valuation or acquisition target. The early predecessors of this technology did achieve mind-boggling valuations and personal wealth as a result, but this precedent caused an extreme amount of harm to aspiring entrepreneurs across the world.

You see, every few years a new technological trend emerges to forums across the internet before springing into the mainstream. As recently as the 2017 rise of crypto and ICO’s, and the sudden popularity of VR and the Oculus, we could see thorough examples of the early predecessors achieving mass amounts of success within a technological opening, followed by radio silence. To put it simply, by the time the majority of tech hopefuls caught onto a concept, it was already too late to go through the trials and tribulations of establishing a company, launching an MVP, gaining funding, attracting users, and then looking for acquisition with every waking moment of the founders day.

The short history of the ascension of start-ups into the mainstream has made an extreme impact on the way young entrepreneurs view starting a business. People as young as 12-years-old are “founding” Saas companies with an arbitrary name and goal, with the aim of replicating the success of Zuckerberg and Thiel. A simple LinkedIn search will yield you the results of hundreds of wannabe teenage entrepreneurs hunting for the elusive “$50 Million dollar acquisition”

That raises the inevitable question to people looking to start a business. With all the noise of start-ups almost instantly receiving funding from VCs and acquisitions happening almost as frequently, it can be easy to try and replicate that success and shoot for the stars.

But for every story of prodigious tech success, there are quite literally millions of stories of failed app projects and Saas endeavors. To put it bluntly, the chances of success in the field of tech start-ups without significant connections and luck involved can only be compared to finding a needle in a haystack.

What I would recommend to every person looking for this type of success, is to scale down and focus on solving extremely small but prevalent issues amongst verticals in any market. Start by approaching every SME in your city and offering tech consultancy, or develop software that will make it easier for small companies to manage payroll. Doing this is much more productive and lucrative than trying to create the “Uber of drycleaning”

I’ll end this piece with a quote from The Social Network:

“A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what is? A Billion dollars.”

Which is true, if you can track down Mark Zuckerberg at a college frat party and convince him to award you 3% of Facebook for founding a music pirating site.

-Nicholas Mihailou