In the startup world right now, everyone refers to and wants to be a Thunder Lizard, a Black Swan, or Unicorn, but the only way to identify one is after they have evolved into a Thunder Lizard, Black Swan or Unicorn. But what were they before? You can never identify a unicorn before it is a unicorn, but you can identify a cockroach and hope that it gets blasted with some radiation to become a mythical beast.
”Unicorn” was never meant to be such a commonly used term – the whole point was that they were mythical, almost unthinkable and impossibly scarce organisms.
Talk like this is refreshingly sane backlash against the naive chat around the Unicorn topic, even if it verges fairly close to some of the same egotistical tendencies.