The Unicorn’s Shadow

Combating the Dangerous Myths That Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors

By: Ethan Mollick

Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray

When you think of a successful entrepreneur, who comes to mind? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe even Jesse Eisenberg, the man who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network? It may surprise you that most successful founders look very different from Zuckerberg or Gates. In fact, most start-up origin stories are very different from the famous "unicorns" that have achieved valuations of greater than one billion dollars, from Facebook to Google to Uber. In The Unicorn's Shadow Ethan Mollick takes us to the forefront of an empirical revolution in entrepreneurship. New data and better research methods have overturned the conventional wisdom behind what a successful founder looks like, how they succeed, and how the start-up ecosystem works. Among the issues he examines: Which founders are most likely to succeed?; where do the best start-up ideas come from?; what's the most foolproof way of securing the funding needed to take a company to the next level?; and what's the best way to grow and scale your company and create a thriving culture that won't hinder expansion?

Mollick argues that entrepreneurship is too important, both for society and for the individuals who start companies, to be eclipsed by the shadows of unicorns. He shows we can democratize entrepreneurship - but only by following an evidence-based approach that puts to rest the false narratives that surround it.

©2020 Ethan Mollick (P)2022 Ascent Audio

Fantastic!

Great research and time was put into this book and it shows! The author is well educated on business and data and delivers a powerful data driven analysis on startup success and failure!

Useful premise, but too short

The premise is relevant and useful, if a little hackneyed. A deeper, more dense treatment of the topics would have made for a more enjoyable and knowledge enhancing read, however.

Largely about securing VC funding

I was hoping for more info on growing a business organically. This book does offer some of that, such as:

* get enough sleep rather than grinding away at 1AM,
* found either alone, with family, or with someone you’ve worked with before
* be in a good mood and maybe use caffeine or alcohol to generate ideas
* you can generate business ideas “from the bottom-up”, by leaning into your own interests, rather than trying to come up with ideas “from the top-down”
* use a formal structure for your interviews (e.g. ask the same questions each time) so you can meaningfully compare candidates, rather than doing unstructured interviews, which tend to be worse than not interviewing at all
* use an org chart to clearly delineate the division of labor in your company
* middle managers get a bad rap, but good ones can make a huge difference in product quality
* programmers vary wildly in ability. The difference between a good and mediocre programmer can be >27x on some metrics
* company cultures tend to last for a long time, even hundreds of years, so set your culture right from the start

So, all of this seems like good advice, but none of it was surprising to me. Most of the rest of the book is about the factors that influence VC funding.

So… meh. I’m sure that for ~$14 this book will pay for itself in time, but I was expecting more info about how to grow and run a company organically, rather than how to please VCs.