I can share some thoughts from 3.
First rule of fight club is you have no ******* idea it will be a unicorn.
Anyone who says otherwise is full of ****. It’s like the victor rewriting history.
So your question is actually something you ask a Tarot card reader.
It’s a dumb question.
There are things you can do to improve your chances though.
- You identify an opportunity worth doing (Hard)
- You develop a thesis for why it will work (which you validated in some form)
- You ideally find a CEO who already have experience having done it at a smaller scale (they probably exited) so you know how to execute it again without doing too much stupid ****
- You secure real financial backing (4m angel round) to execute (you are legit and not a n00b) so you gain traction between rounds.. this is pretty key actually
- You recruit serious people from the start who don’t want nor need to be told what to do. Those people recruit more top talent
- You ride their ass to deliver more than is reasonable
- You work hard and smart
- For certain businesses, you constantly do promotions to gain users
- You constantly fundraise. You probably have an M&A strategy to get larger faster and the backing to do so
- You have a lot of savings and know investors who will bridge you as **** is going to happen and you are going to get close to death… you freak out and do whatever it takes to get the money to stay alive… just long enough for that new round (Super key!)
- You listen to investors and deliver results on the exact KPIs they want to fund you in sequence to your stage
- You figure out economies of scale so you can multiply efforts to scale geographically- unit economics seem to make sense (but actually don’t)
- You hire and fire regularly to keep people on their toes and figure who really delivers
- You work your ass off all the time
- You screw people over, but still come out the good guy through manipulation
- You delegate really well.
- Group operations and ****
I’m trying to give you an actual answer, but there is no fricking play book. It’s all too much to explain.
You start something and you are LUCKY.
You have a SERIOUS team
**** works…
Yay!
Do more of that.
Bring in people smarter than you and delegate.
Raise money.
Holy **** IPO time!?
The better question is how can I validate a startup idea before starting?
How do you validate a startup idea? –
You don’t just ‘start’ a unicorn unless you are really smart.
I’ve consulted for founders that have engineered a unicorn from the start, but they are smarter and richer than you (they already exited unicorns).
There are a lot of unicorns these days, but the notion of unicorn actually meant WTF before.