Apart from the big horn, what’s so great about unicorns?

Thanks BBC

Why did Uber out ride Lyft, Google out search Yahoo!, Airbnb outstay Onefinestay and Facebook crowd (sp.) out Myspace? How come Monzo, Revolut and Starling have each achieved $1bn+ valuations before going public, when Marcus, Nutmeg and Goldfish have all withered?

“The number of $1bn private businesses has exploded in the last 15 years, from 10 in 2010 to over 1,600 in 2026 (thanks Behind the Balance Sheet).”

Known as unicorns, these companies hold a level of fascination and mystique in business and investment communities. They strike a chord with that very raw human instinct: ambition.

The equine-like versions of unicorns are of course mythical. But their mystique transcends into the modern interpretation of a business unicorn. In this article we highlight the common attributes of business unicorns (and decacorns) and how you might learn from some of the more famous private companies. And we also reaffirm that building valuable businesses requires so many critical elements, all brought together cohesively: desire, skill, precision, commitment, patience, agility, attention to detail, craft and imagination, among many others.

Read to the end and you’ll find ChatGPT’s screen video and transcript, based on the same brief we used to create this article (we’ve given this version a B plus – a significant step up from previous versions of our articles).

Tusk to tusk

Thanks Tim Melling, Flickr

Of course there is no evidence that hippomorphic unicorns ever existed. They were imagined in order to signify speed – too fast to catch – and purity (some myths suggested they could only be caught by virgins).

Encyclopaedia’s in the 13th century started to depict the first recorded images of unicorns and they are mentioned in nine different places in the Bible. Their subsequent use in coats of arms also projected a dynasty’s power, value and exalted status. The idea of $1bn+ privately held businesses being labelled unicorns perhaps has similar influences, and was first used in 2014. It implies these companies have a near mythical status and possess the speed, power, strength, and value that that rarity implies.

87% of US companies with revenues above $100m are private*, and 64% of the UK’s 500 largest business are privately owned**

Given that private businesses dominate growth markets, it’s a slice of the economy which has much to teach us about value creation.

I’ve got horns, they’re multiplying

Thanks IMDb

Unicorns are probably most easily distinguished by their pearlescent spiral horns, like those displayed at the Cluny Museum, or collected by Pope Clement VII in the sixteenth century. These are in fact tusks from narwhals, a cetacean marine animal roaming the seas of the far North Atlantic, 3.5m in length. They are heralded as a singular, high-value, distinguishing asset – like a powerful brand, proprietary technology, a disruptive model, a team of raw talent, or a combination of those qualities – that justifies a billion-dollar valuation.

But the horn is only the headline. To survive in the wild, unicorns also require foresight, agility, and the ability to tell a story so compelling it becomes legend.

Before our analysis of the similarities between business and equine versions of unicorns, first let’s look at the scale and impressive growth of the private company sector.

Our good friends at investment analytics and training firm Behind the Balance Sheet recently wrote about unicorns (and decacorns – private companies with $10bn+ valuations) and the problems and opportunities they pose for investors.

Here’s their summary analysis:

Growth in Large Companies Trend

Thanks Behind the Balance Sheet

You can read the full article on their blog, here.

And America still dominates the breeding of unicorns:

Thanks Behind the Economist

Perhaps the pioneering spirit, agility, and survival instincts of the Founding Fathers lives on in the culture and methods of American entrepreneurs, while other societies rest on their laurels, shackled by their traditions and the inherent fear of being branded failures.

Rebel. With a cause

Thanks Reel13

Similar to those highly successful Founding Fathers, and other “change pioneers” like the Sans-Culottes and fictional Rebel Alliance, unicorn businesses have highly distinctive and recognisable characteristics:

A rallying cry founded on a compelling purpose. Other than creating shareholder value, companies that have achieved unicorn status have a cause; more akin to a founder-led movement with a rallying cry for their industry, than a bland, indistinguishable mission statement (often written by management consultants).

An edgy, energetic and dynamic positioning that challenges the entrenched norms and rules of an industry. The culture has a David vs. Goliath power to it that drives every person in the business to want to win.

A relentless focus on unconventional sales and marketing. Founders of unicorn businesses know that sales and building a famous brand are the fundamental measure of success. Profits and cash generation will follow revenue growth. They deploy guerrilla tactics and bold messaging to achieve fame, win customers and build intrinsic brand value.

An obsession with customer experience. Every aspect of the customer journey; from initial brand engagement to purchase, through to service is tirelessly analysed and obsessively improved. This drives increased trust in and adoption of the brand and product.

Below we have set out some of our favourite examples of unicorns and how they created a cause (and staggering shareholder and brand value).

Thanks Irish Times

Brand: Ryanair
Competition: legacy airlines
Proposition: no frills, low fares combined with simple telephone and online booking. Does what it says on the tin. Every time
Rallying cry: you’re overpaying for frills
Market cap: €25bn (Ryanair was not technically a unicorn as its market cap at IPO in 1997 was a mere €450m)

Thanks Next City

Brand: Airbnb
Competition: accommodation industry
Proposition: earn easy money from your most valuable asset
Rallying cry: an individual and cheaper way to stay locally
Market cap: $73bn

Thanks Disruption Banking

Brand: Revolut
Competition: legacy banking industry
Proposition: better banking
Rallying cry: a movement against the unfair, greedy and expensive practices of traditional banks
Market cap: $75bn (at last financing)

Thanks Disruption Banking

Brand: Uber
Competition: regulated taxi monopolies and licensed private hire firms
Proposition: connecting private drivers directly with customers via a simple, on-demand app
Rallying cry: a crowd movement, freeing millions of drivers from regulation and giving cheaper and more convenient access to private transportation
Market cap: $148bn

Thanks Trading Guide

Brand: Robinhood
Competition: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other traditional stockbrokers
Proposition: transparent, zero fees trading
Rallying cry: democratising financial markets making trading profits available to everyone
Market cap: $65bn

Show me the money

Thanks Pink Floyd

Nearly all founders, failed and successful, will tell you that investment capital is the lifeblood of a startup. In the absence of cash from profits or cash flow financing from debt, equity capital is the magic ingredient that drives the investment essential to product development, sales, marketing, operations and infrastructure.

However the tortuous process of raising capital is often described by founders as “worse than sticking pins in your eyes.” Yet the rewards are substantial – cash to invest in priorities critical to growth, or even just to stay in the game, is the unique fuel for ambition that investment capital provides.

Why did companies like Booking.com, Uber and Perplexity succeed in attracting almost unlimited growth capital in their early stages of development, while rivals struggled to secure backing or build valuations? Private (and public) market investors look for many attributes in a company, but what they cite most frequently is brand. The premium valuations at IPO of companies like mobile phone disrupter Orange are founded on a distinctive and compelling brand.

If you want to learn from one of the greatest brand, marketing and behavioural scientists about the relationship between brand and value, Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of Ogilvy, you can listen to him (or read a summary) on Behind the Balance Sheet’s podcast here.

Thanks Behind The Balance Sheet

Traditional accounting methods have little place for valuing brands, because they are intangible and future-facing. Just ask Michael Angelo, Faberge, Ferrari or Banksy. But beautifully crafted and brilliantly executed brands are the key to attracting quality and valuable capital. They drive:

higher margins, through price differentiation;

lower cost of growth and customer acquisition, through higher conversion and network effect marketing;

higher customer retention and lifetime customer value.

If you want to see how to value your brand and gain your Board’s and investor’s confidence in its financial foundations, please read our article here.

It’s all about numbers. Or is it?

Thanks Soundcloud

In our most basic quest for success, the human tendency is to want to simplify, both the problems we are trying to solve and the solutions to those problems. Entrepreneurial success however is complex and dependent on hundreds of interconnected factors.

We recently attended a private equity investor briefing and below is a slide from one of the General Partners, setting out the five key characteristics that they seek out in the teams and businesses that they invest in:

Being ambitious, brave, bold, nice, team-focused and responsible may seem obvious. But entrepreneurs will tell you there are hundreds of other tricky, complex and difficult factors that can mean the difference between success and failure.

And here is Jeff Bezos’s simplified list of critical success factors, in his well-publicised journey of building Amazon into a $2trn business

Stay “Day 1”
Obsess over customers
Play the long game
Don’t worship process
Stay close to the customer / seek truth
Use “two-way door” decisions
70% of the info is enough (move fast)
Disagree and commit
High-velocity decision making
Escalate true misalignment quickly
Trust your judgement / keep high standards
Never get too comfortable (keep reinventing);
Lead with heart / people matter

But as quoted in our article about winning brands and their websites, the CEO of Booking.com once said to one of our writers “we do 100 things 1% better than our competitors”.

You can read the full article here.

The devil is in the detail

Oversimplification of problems and solutions might lead to overlooking important details, any one of which could mean the difference between being a unicorn and an ass. Getting the small details right is invariably fundamental to every successful business, especially when it comes to your customer experience and how that is communicated through a brand idea.

I believe in miracles

Thanks IMDb

There’s a comforting, if naive, idea that if you build a brilliant product, the world will automatically beat a path to your door. But the graveyard of failed startups is littered with superior products that nobody remembers, while inferior ones with better branding currently grace your mobile phone’s home screen or make the top 100 business media lists.

The mobile streaming service Quibi had a $1.75 billion valuation and glossy Superbowl ads. It paid upwards of $6 million per hour of high quality short-form programming from A-listers including Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Jennifer Lopez. It also had an identity crisis so severe that a significant number of survey respondents assumed it was a food delivery service. It shut down in six months.

Investors consistently value brand and marketing when evaluating companies to invest in. They frequently cite three factors in their decision-making to back private companies: a distinct brand proposition, efficient and scalable marketing, and robust technology platforms. For ambitious scale-ups in the £5m–£200m revenue range, those elements are often the difference between stalling and scaling.

PitchBook research highlights that strong brand positioning improves deal sourcing, fundraising, and exit outcomes.

Thanks PitchBook

Get back on your horse

Thanks IntoFilm

It’s also a myth that the leaders of unicorns possess some mystical talent that mere mortals do not. Experience, learning, determination and the ability to adapt quickly are all attributes of leadership teams of unicorns.

When Mosaic Ventures, another VC firm, recently looked at nearly 200 founders of unicorns, it discovered that two in three were run by repeat entrepreneurs. “It is the second or third time that produces a unicorn,” says Simon Levene, one of the firm’s partners.

Ryanair was a bankrupt airline before it was turned around by a failed accountant, Michael O’Leary, to become the undisputed leader in the no frills, low fares airline business.

How do Gorillas become Gorillas?

Thanks Unesco

This is the space where we at addmustard, a full-service marketing agency built exclusively for entrepreneurs, operates. Since 2012, we have been working with clients on a performance fee model that shares risk and reward, helping founders to sharpen propositions, reduce marketing costs and build scalable tech that investors value.

The results from its clients speak for themselves:

Focus Group, the business telecoms to cybersecurity business, grew its valuation by 300% in four years to $1bn.

Sokito, the sustainable sports brand, achieved 5X valuation growth in just two years, after brand investment and B2C sales and marketing acceleration.

Marsh & Parsons, the estate agent brand, exited at three times the multiple of its peer group after a seven-year integrated brand and sales campaign.

As one entrepreneur and Angel Investor put it:

“As an investors we want clarity of brand and efficiency of the marketing engine to set the company apart – addmustard has helped me with that across a number of businesses.”

A partner for entrepreneurial ambition

addmustard’s unique alignment with entrepreneurs means we are focused on forensic detail in every aspect of our clients’ businesses, in order to create value. Bringing together the finer and critical points of brand performance, marketing, technology, customer experience, and investment to create a truly differentiated and compelling business requires skill, commitment, patience, craft, imagination and precision. For founders, those attributes can mean not only growth but exits that outperform the market and legacies that outlive the competition.

And in a world where ‘unicorns’ are becoming increasingly the norm – to the extent the term faces its own redundancy – all the next “big things” would do well to bear that in mind. Otherwise they may find they’re just expensive horses with party hats glued to their foreheads, waiting for a crowd that never shows up.

Sources: *source S&P Capital IQ and Apollo and **source McKinsey

Get in touch

We have worked with over 50 entrepreneurs over the last decade to create exceptional value in their businesses and brands.

If you’d like to know how to make your business more attractive and valuable, with a unifying, distinctive and compelling brand, consistently underpinning and applied to everything your business does to drive growth, please get in touch.

We guarantee you’ll be talking to a bold, energetic, precise and sometimes slightly irreverent addmustard human.

The ChatGPT video version of this article (we’re really impressed with this latest version of ChatGPT: it’s becoming much more instinctive, lateral and robust).

ChatGPT brief: Write me an article about both equine and business unicorns, addressing the unique characteristics of each. Provide a context and history of each kind, how their mystique has grown and evolved and why they capture imaginations of young children through to business leaders.

ChatGPT Transcript:

Unicorns: From Mythic Beasts to Billion-Dollar Dreams

The Unicorn as Animal: Grace, Purity and Power

Long before the word was co-opted by venture capitalists, the unicorn existed as a creature of legend—an equine form, typically a white horse with a single spiralling horn, symbolising purity, strength and rarity.

References to unicorn-like creatures appear as early as ancient Greece, where writers such as Ctesias described a wild ass in India with a single horn. Through the Middle Ages, the unicorn became deeply embedded in European folklore, often appearing in religious allegory. In Christian symbolism, it represented Christ—untameable except by purity, often depicted resting in the lap of a virgin.

By the Renaissance, unicorns had become visual shorthand for the unattainable made real. The famous Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries portray the creature as both hunted and transcendent—killed, yet somehow alive again. This duality—fragility paired with invincibility—became central to its mystique.

Over centuries, the unicorn’s meaning evolved but retained three core characteristics:

Rarity: A creature that almost certainly doesn’t exist
Purity or perfection: Untouched, idealised, incorruptible
Power: The horn (allegedly) could purify poisoned water and heal illness

It is this combination—something impossibly rare, yet immensely powerful—that has allowed the unicorn to endure in the imagination of children and adults alike.:

The Business Unicorn: Scarcity, Scale and Myth-Making

Fast forward to 2013, when venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to describe privately held startups valued at over $1 billion.

At the time, these companies were as rare as their mythical namesake. Fewer than 40 existed globally. Today, there are well over a thousand.

Yet the label stuck—not because of its accuracy, but because of its aspiration.

Business unicorns share a different but strikingly parallel set of characteristics:

Rarity (or perceived rarity): Despite growing numbers, true breakout companies remain exceptional
Transformational power: They reshape industries-think Uber, Airbnb or Stripe
Myth building: Founders become quasi-legendary figures; origin stories are polished into folklore

Like their equine counterparts, business unicorns exist in a space between reality and narrative. The valuation may be grounded in financial models, but the belief in the company—the story of what it might become—is what fuels its ascent.

Parallel Histories: From Folklore to Financial Models

What’s fascinating is how both forms of unicorn emerged from human attempts to describe the exceptional.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the unicorn gave form to ideals that couldn’t be easily explained—purity, divinity, the miraculous.
In modern capitalism, the unicorn captures something equally elusive: explosive, nonlinear growth in a world that typically moves incrementally.

Both are, in essence, language shortcuts for improbability.

And both have undergone a similar evolution:

From rare to more common: Medieval bestiaries treated unicorns as real but elusive; today’s markets produce unicorns more frequently
From literal to symbolic: No one expects to find a unicorn in a forest; similarly, seasoned investors know most “unicorns” are overvalued at some stage
From mystery to systematisation: Just as naturalists tried to categorise mythical beasts, venture capital has attempted to industrialise unicorn creation

Why Unicorns Captivate—from Children to CEOs

The enduring appeal of unicorns—both mythical and corporate—comes down to a shared psychological pull.

1. They represent the extraordinary.
Children are drawn to unicorns because they are magical and rare. Business leaders are drawn to unicorns because they promise outsized returns and category dominance.

2. They validate belief against odds
A unicorn suggests that something improbable can be real. For a child, that’s magic. For a founder, it’s the idea that a startup can go from nothing to billions.

3. They reward imagination
Unicorns require you to suspend disbelief. In business, this translates into backing ideas that seem unrealistic—until they aren’t.

4. They create narratives people want to belong to
Whether it’s a fairy tale or a startup journey, unicorns are storytelling devices. They give people something to root for, invest in, and talk about.

The Double Edge of the Unicorn Myth

There is, however, a tension in both domains.

In folklore, the unicorn is often hunted—its rarity making it vulnerable. In business, unicorn status can be equally precarious:

Inflated valuations can collapse
Growth expectations can become unsustainable
The myth can outpace the fundamentals

In both cases, the unicorn’s defining trait—its exceptionality—is also its risk.

From Forests to Founders: A Shared Symbol

Ultimately, the equine unicorn and the business unicorn are not so different. They are both constructs designed to capture human fascination with the rare, the powerful, and the almost impossible.

One lives in illuminated manuscripts and children’s books.

The other in pitch decks and financial headlines.

But both answer the same underlying human need:

to believe that somewhere—whether in a distant forest or a fledgling startup—something extraordinary exists, just waiting to be discovered.

ChatGPT Transcript:
Unicorns: From Mythic Beasts to Billion-Dollar Dreams