How are unicorns born?

Referred to as such due to their rarity, Unicorns are the disruptors, the game changers, the first movers and the aggressively constant innovators that have shaped 21st Century living in a few short years.

Remember life before Uber, Airbnb, Snap, Dropbox or Spotify? Vaguely.

Their obsessive consumer focus has given us what we never knew we needed and even more importantly, what we now cannot live without.

Yeah but how?

It’s easy to look at the sheer number of these emerging giants and conclude that conditions are ripe for entrepreneurs with the accessibility of crowd-funding, viral marketing on social media and fierce competition between VCs looking to invest in the “next big thing.”

But in reality the startup game is an anything-goes, sink-or-swim, you-shoulda-stayed-at-home kind of hustle. Only the strong and lucky survive, the rest will be either eaten (if they’re lucky) or just fade into nothing but an inactive Twitter account and an awkward conversation in a year or two about whether we should renew our website subscription. The latter happening to the vast, vast majority.

So what’s in the Secret Sauce?

Well it’s called a “Sauce” for a reason - there’s no 1 or 2 things that make it. It’s really a culmination of: luck, connections, ideas, hard work, purpose, insights, habit, hard work, innovation, vision, hard work, culture, timing, market conditions, hard work, branding, constant iteration and just working really hard.

Although it may feel like Airbnb happened overnight, it actually started way back in 2007 but didn’t really start to grow for a number of years. There was a point where the co-founders even resorted to selling limited edition presidential cereal (Obama O’s) just to fund their development and were rejected by a number of VCs.

Point being, luck doesn’t grow on trees and it takes more than a good idea and smart people to get a startup off the ground.

Picking them early

Tomorrow’s Unicorns are already on course, it’s about whether individuals or companies are willing to look beyond their own bias and see the world through the eyes of a futurist.

At its core, the secret sauce is all about time. Working and being present in the now so that there will be no regrets into the future. Primas is the epitome of this concept; a startup must look at where the ball is now but aim for where it is going.

With insights about the future of the Internet as being less about URLs and more about actual content and engagement, as well as a belief in the potential for the Internet to be much more than fake news, clickbait and unauthorised plagiarism; Primas is serious about bringing value to society. In being a tech-product company, Primas is not immune to the chicken-and-egg user acquisition problems faced by others in the industry - but as with everything, constant iteration, a focus on broader vision and real hustle will provide solutions.

Exciting stuff!