Unicorn, Schmunicorn —Just Go Build Your Empire
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Unicorns. They’re all the chatter, right? Heck, I even bought a high-gloss, gold-covered paper mâché unicorn head for our office conference room a few weeks ago to give the team a nice Monday chuckle. I’ve seen unicorns on the cover of prominent business magazines who now have their own LIST of unicorns. And, I’ve seen them mentioned in one LinkedIn post after another. I’ve even heard that certain Stanford alumnus have petitioned to rid the university of The Stanford Tree in place of The Stanford Unicorn. It’s cute, right? Then, this week, I saw a great article from another local Phoenix entrepreneur about the forgotten, but reliable workhorse. It got me thinking. Doesn’t the world have enough workhorses? Shouldn’t we want to be unicorns? Listen, last year I was lucky enough to spend some time in San Francisco while launching Allbound. And while many of us “outside” the valley imagine it as a green, lush breeding ground of unicorns, the truth is that the most encouraging and satisfying element of that ecosystem for most isn’t the “unicorns,” but rather the (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs and startups willing to make tremendous sacrifices just to try to change their own little piece of the world. In every coffee shop. At every corner of the city. People were innovating and trying to hack their way to success one line of code and one new customer at a time. The term “unicorn” for them wasn’t a fairytale land of gold and riches, but a tireless goal that these entrepreneurs were willing to lay everything on the line for. Not a…
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