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‘Well, now we have seen each other,’ said the unicorn, ‘if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?’ -Lewis Carroll |
If you're living in Silicon Valley, the only thing more commonly discussed than the coolest productivity app is the rise of the unicorn companies. Thanks to Aileen Lee’s 2013 “Unicorn Club” post, the term Unicorn no longer just means a mythical one-horned horse-like creature. It now means a mythical one billion dollar tech venture. By Aileen's definition, a “U.S.-based software company started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors”.
Unicorns are the it thing. Venture capitalists want to find them and fund them. Founders and CEOs want to start them. Engineers want to build them. Service providers want to cater to them. We are in the golden age of Unicorns. Never in the history of software have more companies risen to billion-dollar valuations as quickly as in the last 5 years. It took companies like Oscar and Zenefits only 2 years to reach Unicorn status, faster than even Uber, Facebook and AirBnB.
The Billionaire Economy
All this insanely rapid wealth creation is making Silicon Valley a weird place to live. There are dozens of billionaire founders and VCs within a stone’s throw of Sand Hill Road just down the street from me. There are more Teslas per capita within a 10 mile radius here than anywhere else - except for maybe downtown Las Vegas thanks to Tony Hsieh. Whether all this wealth creation is actually doing good for humanity remains to be seen. Sure, Uber is keeping thousands of drivers gainfully ’employed’. AirBnB lets normal people make money by hosting guests at their dwellings. Facebook is keeping the world more open and connected. They are all touching billions of lives - and in the case of Facebook, that's just in a day's work.
And yet is market valuation and money the most noble and important metric for measuring ‘value’ to humanity and society? Who wins when companies are worth billions?
Founders and early investors, in most cases. Maybe some lucky early employees, as with Google, Facebook, Paypal. Perhaps those hard-working and lucky individuals will go on to found and fund even greater companies that impact millions and billions of lives in a positive way. Maybe they’ll just buy more Teslas and houses and private planes and hang out on billionaire row at Burning Man. Fewer than a dozen Silicon Valley billionaires have joined Warren Buffet’s Giving Pledge: not Sergey nor Larry nor Eric Schmidt, nor Travis nor the dozens of Google, PayPal, Twitter, Apple and Facebook billionaires. The fine exceptions exist: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
Opening the Ark to All
Where are all the companies committed to enhancing the value of human life? Too few are focused on optimizing lifespan, solving for premature death, curing unnecessary disease, unlocking our personal DNA, mapping how we’re all connected, and improving the state of humanity in some large way. Are our social networks or gaming companies and hookup apps not successful enough such that we need another more of them? Why is this work left to foundations like The Gates Foundation? Where are all the brilliant minds solving the big, important life-saving, life enhancing problems?
Among the thousands of paired creatures saved on the Ark, there was the Unicorn. It's said the Unicorn did not make it on the Ark due to hubris
I propose adding a new breed of company to the lexicon of Silicon Valley: the Ark.
Removing the religious teaching of the Ark story for a moment, let’s just focus on the parable: The Ark saved humanity from the flood. The Ark lifted humanity to a greater state of existence; apparently the human race had become so wicked, evil, violent and corrupt that it was not fit to go on living. Does this sound a little bit like the sad state of affairs in the world today? Where is the compassion that inspires smart entrepreneurs to solve for humanity’s greatest problems? Not the ones that affect the 1%, those that touch the 99% - poverty, hunger, disease, death, lack of education, lack of access to water, basic healthcare and proper nutrition.
An Ark company can be a not-for-profit like Internet.org, which aims to connect the two-thirds of the people on the planet that don’t have Internet access - and is directly supported by Facebook. Or a company that crowdfunds healthcare to people around the world who could not otherwise afford it - funded by some of Silicon Valley's most influential investors. Or companies that give humans access to clean drinking water, the vital ingredient that sustains life.
Most all of these companies focus on some aspect of human health and quality of life improvement. These are noble, humanitarian-focused, life-enhancing companies with the power to improve billions of lives and impact the next several generations.
Look at Theranos, which aims to empower every human with access to their own personalized health data to enable the detection and prevention of disease. Or Counsyl, which gives everyone access to know their own personal DNA. These are Noah’s Ark companies. They are also Unicorns. Good for investors, good for humanity.
Loading up the Ships
If you are an entrepreneur, a technologist, a consumer, an investor - I implore you to devote your time and your dollars to help build the Ark companies of the future. Being a unicorn and an Ark aren’t mutually exclusive, either.
My aim is to build a hybrid, then to join The Giving Pledge to give it all back to humanity and pay it forward to the next generation. My project happens to focus on the health of mothers and children, on maternal-child health, because as a mother I believe there is nothing more important to a parent than your child’s health. If you want to improve the health of humanity and the health of future generations, I believe we should start with the beginning of life – at conception, birth and the first thousand days. If ever your health fails or the health of a loved one fails, you want an Ark to help you through it.
When doing one's end of life accounting, the zeroes in one's bank account don't make a difference - but the lives touched do. Ultimately, money doesn’t buy happiness. But maybe if a few hundred of us build a few hundred more Ark companies, we can lift the tide for all of humanity by the billions.