THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, ‘unicorns’ are privately held start-up companies with a value of over $1 billion. And despite the global pandemic, last year we saw more companies reach unicorn status than ever before. They included Savage X Fenty, a lingerie brand co-founded by musician Rihanna; Alation, a start-up that helps crawl a company’s databases to build a data search catalogue; and Pacaso, whose mission is to provide more people with a chance at second-home ownership.
The question is, how do some technology companies go on to become billion-dollar enterprises while others don’t? While start-ups often struggle to find a product/market fit and define a business model, tech ‘scale-ups’ — more mature yet still-adolescent companies characterized by rapid annual growth of over 20 per cent for at least three years — face the next-level challenge of not only expanding and growing revenue, but doing so exponentially relative to resource expenditures in capital, people and technology.
Many business leaders believe scale-up to be the most difficult phase of a company’s
