What is a Cockroach Startup?

Shafeeq Ur Rahaman
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

So you might have heard of the word Unicorn and Unicorn startups. Have you ever heard about a Cockroach startup? Seriously am not joking cockroach…!!!!!

Just how the term Unicorn came into existence, Cockroach was used by Paul Graham in 2007 where he wisely quoted “Apparently the most likely animals to be left alive after a nuclear war are cockroaches, because they are hard to kill. That’s what you want to be as a startup, initially. Instead of a beautiful but fragile flower that needs to have its stem in a plastic tube to support itself, better to be small, ugly and indestructible”. Later it lost its significance until Dave McClure brought it into the limelight in his article of 2013 where he advised founders to build “a lean little fucking cockroach startup” and from there on the term has been in use every now and then.

Cockroach, you can say it as a quality to describe a particular startup which is having the refusing-to-die mentality. Winning in startups is very much about refusing to give up. Resilience matters. In a nutshell, a cockroach startup is a one, which refuses to give up under any circumstances and keeps going on but unicorns if they don’t have a cockroach’s core value they would perish. The same happens when a nuclear Armageddon (economic meltdown) occurs the Unicorns would start to panic as their cash reserves are affected by the VC’s and super angels who were supporting them. All of the sudden massive layoffs, cost cutting etc would happen. In case of a cockroach, they know not to panic and never to give up. They plan to fail plan again fail again and plan but they refuse to give up. At the end of the economic meltdown when you stand up and look around you would still see these cockroaches present because cockroaches are the most likely creatures to survive even after a nuclear strike. They might be thinner than before but they have survived compared to the odds of several other Unicorns.

P.S. These shares are just to spread chunks of information. As I find it interesting sharing something meaningful. As it all matters that you “Go to bed smarter than when you woke up”

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