# What's different about unicorns?

**Author:** Jessica Livingston
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8L-what-s-different-about-unicorns
**YouTube ID:** Ygr3rx4hSsc

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Jessica Livingston gives a talk on how to be not just successful, but massively successful, and points to women-founded
billion dollar companies as the next focus. Originally from Female Founders Conference 2017.

## Transcript

hi everyone I can't see you but I'm so excited to see you um this is actually my first time back in the Bay Area in more than a year um I've been living in England for the past year with my family and I just could not miss this day so here I am back for 24 hours jet lag and all so hopefully I can deliver this it's

okay in one piece um before I get started I just would love to just take a moment to thank the women who've recently come forward um so bravely on the record to speak out about the sexual harassment they've faced working in Silicon Valley um I just cannot thank them enough they're my heroes um hopefully their actions will cause more women to speak

up and help put an end to the discrimination and the harassment that we as women can face working in the startup community so one more round of applause so so awesome all right where am I here all right here we go so last year if you were here you'll remember that I spoke about all the problems that can arise in a startup and how to avoid them and to be honest I think last year's talk was the best General startup advice I could

give you uh so if you haven't read it please go to this link and read it and even if you have read it it's worth a reread because these are the type of problems that can get you even when you think you're already watching out for them so there's the link uh last year I ended by saying that I want there to be more women founders of the big companies um of the so-called uniforms and these are the founders who

make the most influential role models and role models are what we need most if you want to encourage more women to start their own companies um in recent years there's been an increase in the number of women who are starting startups and in the number of women who've raised significant seed and series a rounds and this is good uh but now we've got to focus on the next Target we need to have more women of who are founding billion dooll startups

so that's what I'm going to talk about today um what it takes to start a startup that's not merely successful but is massively successful um and I'm not saying everyone has to do this you don't have to start a startup and if you do you don't have to start a Google but if you do want to start a Google what does it take what's the difference between a successful startup and a massively successful startup and fortunately I've seen enough of both types at closeand

that I can see patterns of differences so I've made a list of things that I think are different about the unicorns and there are nine of them I want to get this one out of the way from the very start um in addition to having everything else that they need the unicorns are lucky and one of the most important kinds of luck is timing the most successful Founders have the right idea at the right time and you

have less control over that than you might think actually because the best ideas are not deliberate they tend to grow organically out of the founders lives uh however while the most successful Founders are all Lucky they're not merely lucky it's never like they have this great idea and then boom a few years later they're a billionaire far far from that one of the most noticeable

difference between founders of the super successful startups and the moderately successful startups is their motives and in particular the founders of the super successful startups never are in it mainly to get rich or to seem cool they're always fanatically interested in what the company is doing incidentally it's perfectly fine to start a startup mainly for the money but uh unless your motives change throughout the course of it it probably won't wind up being one of the big ones

there are multiple reasons why startups do better when the founders are truly interested in the idea um they work harder because they love the work and their enthusiasm is infectious they think longer term and they're much harder for another company to capture with an acquisition offer because they don't actually want to quit so this one is going to sound really obvious um be to be a huge

startup you have to have a huge Market you have to make something that a lot of people will pay for or that people will pay a lot for um and this is one place luck actually has a very big effect because Market sizes are impossible to predict uh for example the airbnbs didn't know how many people would want to stay in other people's homes um all they knew was that enough wood to make it an idea that was worth working on um

the founders of most successful startups never realize early on how big they're going to get uh so our advice at Y combinator is not even to try to hit a a big Market early on uh since you can't predict these things it's better just to work on something you yourself want and then hope that there are lots more people like you when you describe the biggest startups most all of them are doing something very basic uh Google is how

you find information Facebook is where your friends are Uber gives you rides Airbnb gives you somewhere to sleep I mean these are all all things you could explain in a few words to a 5-year-old um however don't use this as a test for what to work on because ideas often start out less General um at first Facebook wasn't where everyone's friends were they were where a couple thousand Harvard students

were a site for a couple thousand students at one college doesn't sound like a very promising idea does it um it may seem promising now because we all know how the story turned out um but at the time it did not um almost all the really big startup ideas seemed dubious at at first um I know exactly how airbnb's idea seemed at first because I was one of the people whose job it was to judge it and I didn't think much of

it at the time to be perfectly honest um and it's not just that these ideas don't seem as big at first as they eventually turn out to be they seem to most people like bad ideas um you need to be a certain type of person who can work on one of these bad ideas that eventually turns into a good one you need to be independent-minded you cannot care what other people think um it's now kind of part of the conventional picture of a

successful founder to be a Maverick and that part of the conventional picture is accurate I really I can't think of one that I would describe as a conformist you also have to be ambitious um because what happens with these initially unpromising ideas is that they blossom into terrifyingly big ones you start a site for college students and

pretty soon you realize you could sign up the whole world if you wanted to um and at at this point most people's reaction is fear um signing up the whole world seems like a lot of work and it also seems like a valuable prize and you have to fight to win those um the fear of Big Ideas prevents most people from even realizing they could start uh you

know a site for for college students and turn that into a site for the the whole world but a few people are more excited than afraid when this happens another thing I noticed about the founders of the really huge startups is that I would not want to stand between something they wanted and them um all 100 100% of them um have exceptional exceptional

drive but it's not always straightforward to to tell how driven someone is um Drive can be suppressed when someone else has authority over you like in most schools or in a job and in these situations people who are really driven um may even read as less promising than people who are merely obedient so not only is it hard for me to tell how driven someone is people

often can't even tell themselves um you can tell after they start a startup though um no one has authority over you in a startup most people find the authority vacuum uncomfortable um but a few people expand into it and those few people think this is what life is supposed to be like drive by itself is not enough

though you have to be driven to work on this particular company in all the really huge startups the company is at least one of the founders life's work so they'd never willingly be acquired for example uh if you sell your life's work then what are you going to do early on starting a startup is all about the product but that changes as a startup gets really really big a Founder

who wants to keep running the company has to become a manager you don't have to have management ability initially there's plenty of empirical evidence to show that you can learn this on the job um but you have to be able to learn it and you probably even have to like it designing cool products and managing people are really different things um most people who like building dislike the idea of being a manager

probably know some people like that uh it's a rare person who can be great at both but you have to be if you want to create one of the really big startups those are the nine things as far as I can tell that are the differences between startups that are merely successful and the ones that become really big but they're not just a list uh when you put them all together they make a story of how a unicorn happens the founders work on something

their experience shows shows them that the world needs it wouldn't seem like a promising idea to most people but the founders work on it anyway partly because they understand the promise of the idea a little bit better and partly just because they think it's cool um they work on the idea and they realize they become even bigger than they had realized um instead of shrinking from this realization they embrace it eagerly and they realize this is what they want

to do with their lives and they're so committed to the company that they're willing to morph themselves into whatever the company needs there's a lot of variety in startups but this is the most common path for the really big ones so remember you don't have to start a startup and if you do it doesn't have to be a unicorn but if you do this is probably what it's going to look like an

unpromising idea that blossoms into a frighteningly big one and the driven Founders who see the opportunity and run with it and I'm hoping that there are some of you in this audience who hear this description and think to themselves oh my gosh it's like she's describing me um um the people on the path to becoming huge don't usually realize it themselves early on but I'm hoping if I can

encourage even a few of you to keep going then when you're successful your example will encourage more new more new women to start their own companies and yes this is a very long-term plan but after all it's my life's work so so thank

you
