Introduction to Baby Unicorn Companies

A framework for thinking about your next opportunity

I recently had a chat with an engineer friend. He has been working at a top tech giant for several years and has made pretty steady progress throughout his career. He’s getting bored though and wants some change of scenery. That’s when he came to talk to me.

This is how the conversation went:

• Me: With your background, there are many unicorns who would love to have you onboard. They have cash to match your current salary and are expanding rapidly so you’ll get to build a team in new areas. They’ll also probably go on to IPO in a couple of years.
• Him: Honestly, it’s too late for me to join a unicorn. They are already pretty big companies. I’d like something more different than what I do now.
• Me: Okay, what about an early-stage startup? You get to do a few years of hands-on coding work and go through the experience of helping a company grow. High risk but high reward.
• Him: Not sure that really early-stage startups are right for me. Salary wise, it is much lower than what I have now and risk level is very high. Looking at the risk / reward ratio perspective, if I were to consider an early-stage startup, I might as well be considering starting my own company.
• Me: Sounds like you should pick a place in between early-stage startups and unicorns? They are beyond the initial product market fit stage and are still expanding very quickly. The stock value could be high as the company continues to grow.
• Him: Yeah, that sounds like a much better fit for me at the moment.

This reminded me of my own thought process when I decided to leave Google.

I wanted to find a company that was no longer in survival mode, but at the same time still needed help to further expand and grow. By some luck, I came across Sumo Logic, then a 300-person and $500M-valuation company at the end of 2015. It worked out very well; I helped them and they helped me.

Right before I decided to accept their offer, my wife asked me a question, and that question still lingers in my mind to this day. “Have you looked into other similar companies to compare?”

I didn’t. I didn’t even know where to find that information.

The list of unicorns has been actively maintained by many websites and easily searchable on Google.

The list of high potential pre-unicorn startups is much harder to come by.

They are available within the private investment community, but less so to the public.

It’s understandable why it’s harder to find and compile such info. The sheer number of companies in this stage is much larger while at the same time, the amount of exposure each of them gets is much smaller. The combination of these two makes it a hard problem. It’s hard to decide which ones to focus on and what we should know about them.

Hard problems are what Leap team likes to tackle, and it fits well in our company mission.

Welcome to the series of Baby Unicorns — companies we believe that have proven product and growth, and have their eyes set on growing into unicorns.

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