Opting Out of Unicorn Economics
Why the future of building in tech isn’t venture-shaped
The Trap
The myth goes a little like this:
“The only way to succeed in the tech industry is to have a billion-dollar business idea or attach yourself to someone else’s billion-dollar idea.”
Despite a 15-year career in tech (including several at-bats at attaching myself to billion-dollar ideas), this has never exactly played out the way I thought it might.
As it turns out, billion-dollar businesses are rare, complicated, and yes, even impermanent.
Even if you’re lucky enough to land in the proximal zone of work of one of these so-called “startup unicorns” (even if you fully vest all four years of your stock options while doing it), it still doesn’t guarantee that you’ll walk out the door with a million-dollar payout.
Of course there are many reasons why people get into the tech industry. High-growth job sector. Interesting people. Novel problem spaces. But the false promise of this startup mythology bothered me for a really long time.
One, because this lore over-indexes on attracting founders who chase a very particular type of dream. And two, because it prevents people from considering new forms of leadership and company-building.
I’ll admit that I fell into this trapped way of thinking.
For a very long time, I believed the only way to start a company in the tech sector was to have an engineering degree and millions of dollars on your side. In other words, if you weren’t a unicorn chaser, you were just a small business owner. Or worse…a consultant.
Ultimately, this is a really myopic view to have about an industry that employs millions of people. But it’s certainly the public narrative, particularly when you grow up among a class of peers who measure their sense of self-worth based on which VCs write them seed stage checks.
When I started to notice that the most celebrated outcome in an industry of builders became check writers instead of company builders, something felt misaligned to me. After all, if the highest-status role is capital allocation, who is left to do the work of building?
The New Company of One
Since I walked away from the so-called “classic path” in tech about four years ago and went fractional, I’ve noticed a funny pattern emerge.
Some of my closest friends in tech weren’t buying into those rules anymore, either.
There’s a group of us who started out fractional during the pandemic and just never went back. We called ourselves consultants. We got by on project-based work for a while. And then we started vibe coding. Today, we are builders. Some of us are even getting paid to build software for other people for the first time in our lives.
This is quite interesting to me.
These are people who have not taken outside investment or capital to get started. But they are rejecting full-time job offers and starting their own LLCs instead. They are figuring out their personal brands. They are chasing down deals. They are honing in on industries and vertical niches they care about. They are tech-fluent up and down the stack. And now, they are becoming AI-fluent too.
What I notice about this cohort is not so much a stubborn resistance to the old ways as much as curiosity about what else may be possible. Rather than a single-minded focus on one work project, could there be a better alternative? A work that includes your whole life (messy bits included)?
As it turns out, once you stop chasing unicorns, you realize there’s a whole other side of tech. One that’s less about world domination and more about curating impact networks around the ideas and themes that matter most to you.
Notably, the public narrative is already trying to distort this lifestyle vision yet again – already glamorizing the wannabe billion-dollar business with a solo founder. A Solo Founders clubhouse program in San Francisco is openly promoting “AI at all cost” and a work-as-life way of living among their cohort of 6 founders.
But what do you notice about the people who are signing up for that program? All men. Most with engineering backgrounds. And so the lore lives on.
To be clear, I don’t think the answer is to replace one fantasy with another. It seems trite to trade unicorn chasing for solo founder worship, or to swap venture-backed pressure for an “AI for everything” grind dressed up as freedom.
The real shift is quieter than that. It’s opting out of a story that says there’s only one way to matter in tech. It’s recognizing that building can be durable, collaborative, and human-scaled. And that leadership doesn’t require permission, capital, or even a pitch deck.
Once you see that, the trap loses its power. Not because you escaped tech, but because you finally stopped mistaking its loudest myths for its only truths.
> Today, we are builders. Some of us are even getting paid to build software for other people for the first time in our lives.
What kind of software?
There’s a certain tech bro energy one doesn’t want to be surrounded by. (Think MAGA.) At the same time? It’s not worth working 16+ hour days when it doesn’t fulfill a person, it destroys you mentally and physically. It’s not worth losing your health from working 16 hour days and never seeing family.