Lessons From DoorDash’s Unicorn Quest

Too Long; Didn't Read

It’s almost as if creating a company with a valuation of $1B+ is the single most important goal of entrepreneurs rather than creating a profitable and sustainable business. In the on-demand food/delivery space, there’s a ton of competition and a race to take the lead. Instead of achieving this goal through pure business growth fundamentals, popular thinking seems to dictate that the easier route is to just gain <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/unicorn" target="_blank">unicorn</a> status and use the value of the company as the metric of market leader. (Granted, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/15/venture-capital-is-terrible-at-online-shopping/" target="_blank">logical VCs</a> should be funding companies that have actual solid growth metrics or at the very least a leadership team that has absolutely zero doubt in their minds that they will win no matter what.)