NFX’s James Currier: Where unicorn ideas come from and why founders ‘have to keep pivoting’

Welcome to TechCrunch+ Tuesday

Are you a seed-stage founder who’s building a unicorn?

Last month, at TechCrunch Early Stage, I spoke to NFX Founding Partner James Currier about where ideas for billion-dollar companies come from.

Currier, who was an angel investor in Patreon, Lyft and DoorDash, said startups that grow into unicorns have three basic forms of defensibility:

• Network effects: Your product becomes more valuable as more people use it.
• Embedding: Integrate your services so deeply, customers “cannot rip them out.”
• Data loops: Gather, process and act on real-time data.

“This is really only talking about world-changing, big-ass businesses with a lot of impact that could be a billion dollars or more in value,” he said.

After giving a presentation he’d previously shared at Harvard Business School, Stanford and MIT, Currier outlined the mental models unicorn founders adopt and offered candid advice for early-stage entrepreneurs, including his thoughts on building a founding team:

“You have to figure out what you and your team are capable of doing. There are all these big pivots that you need to take, but you might not have the people for it. And then it’s a real tear-down.”

Thanks for reading,

Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

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