The cloud journey

Tech unicorns

With the recent announcement that Reddit intends to go IPO, I have some thoughts on our constant pursuit of unicorns in tech, and why that is generally a bad thing. First, I'm not some tech finance guru, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but one that has seen at least some of the trends over the years.

There are a number of decent ideas that with good funding eventually became raging successes. I'm not sure I need to list them, but these are companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. They have big to huge scale, and are basically money printing machines.

My argument here is that every tech idea isn't unicorn-like, and we should stop pretending they all are. In my thinking, a unicorn is where you invest $1 and get back $100. Now, the problem here is that many viable businesses might do say 10x or maybe even 20x, which most of us would consider a great success, but if your goal is a unicorn then this would fall short.

Private capital wants above average returns, and they are willing to risk losing money to make a better payoff. But what this seems to mean is every biz has to grow as quickly as possible. But this means everything is focused on scaling up, rather than making the customer happy. And I think this is a big problem.

Being great at customer stuff means taking time and focus to understand (and fix sometimes) what you are offering. For whatever reason, businesses in the west have made decisions to pretend service is key, while doing as much as possible to avoid actually good service. At scale you can't keep everybody happy, sure, but often simple things can anger customers and the ones who get attention are often those with Internet clout rather than the small, loyal customer.

My issue is that a good business can generate $10k of revenue and that might employ a couple PT people. And that is the "goal" revenue for SaaS tech offerings, the idea being this is the level you become "interesting" as a company. But why can't some small multiple of this be the goal? Why is the end some 100x scale up in the hopes of attaining unicorn status?

So I'd argue we should do more to create and promote real businesses, and leave others to run after unicorns that are less likely to even happen.

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