The document outlines key components that make a potential unicorn startup. These include strong founders with relevant experience and the ability to work well together. The startup must have a big vision for a large market with clear differentiation from competition and a compelling reason for why the problem can be solved now. Other important factors are resourcefulness from the founders, a skilled and flexible team, high velocity in achieving goals, early traction and product-market fit, sales skills from the CEO, and focus on short-term priorities. The document provides advice and criteria for investors to identify startups with the highest likelihood of achieving unicorn status with a billion dollar or more valuation.

1. Hunting unicorns
Ihar Mahaniok, Investor
IT Arena Lviv 2021

2. Why me?
● 9 years of active investing
● 80+ early investments in potential future unicorns, including
○ Unicorns
■ Instacart 🦄🦄🦄
■ PandaDoc 🦄
■ People.ai 🦄
○ Almost unicorns
■ ZeroAvia
■ Appodeal
■ Iterative.ai
■ Jeeves

3. What makes a future unicorn?

4. Key components
● Founders
● Vision
● Market
● Why now?
● Competition
● Resourcefulness
● Team
● Flexibility
● Velocity
● Traction
● Selling
● Focus

5. Founders & CEO
● Track record
○ Previous accomplishments or previous startups
● Did founders work together before?
● Is there a founder-market fit?

6. Vision & story
● Is vision big?
● Can the CEO tell a compelling story?
● Is there a clear problem that startup is trying to solve?
○ Red flag is a “solution in search of a problem”

7. Market
● Are they going after a big market?
○ Should be $10B+ (annual)
● Is market growing?

8. Why now?
● Did other companies try to solve this problem 2-5 years
ago? Why it didn’t work?
● Is the problem new?
● Is the problem already well-formed? Isn’t it too early?

9. Competition
● Does the company know their competition well?
○ There is never “no competitors”. There are only
underinformed founders
● Is there a clear differentiation between this product and
competition?
● What will be the moat against future competition?

10. Resourcefulness
● Does the company “need” money?
○ Investors are not saviors
● Founders should demonstrate that they can operate
regardless of fundraising
● Can they have low burn?
● Path to profitability
● FOMO for investors - only if the company does not need
money

11. Team and culture
● Can founders hire well?
● Can CEO delegate? Are there control issues?
● Great company culture is paramount

12. Flexibility
● Do founders take feedback seriously?
● Are founders able to change their assumptions and
pivot?

13. Velocity
● What did the team achieve in the last 2 weeks? Last
month?
● Velocity is critical in understanding whether the team
can deliver their vision.
● Communicate your most recent achievements to your
prospective investors!

14. Traction and Product-Market-Fit
● It’s ok not to have traction
● But if you do have traction, it’s amazing - show it off.
Traction is a way to prove you have PMF
● Growth is key. Typical “good” growth for a seed startup
is 15% MoM in your key metric
● For pre-launch startup, look to have other ways to show
early PMF. Customer research datapoints or pre-sale
agreements

15. Selling
● CEO is always selling
○ To investors
○ To customers
○ To candidates
● All great startups have CEOs with sales skills

16. Focus
● Lack of money doesn’t kill startups. Lack of focus is
● Vision is what you want to get to in 10 years. Focus is
what you need to do in the next 1-6 months
● Focus on small market

17. Try to get as many of these as you can
● Founders
● Vision
● Market
● Why now?
● Competition
● Resourcefulness
● Team
● Flexibility
● Velocity
● Traction
● Selling
● Focus

18. Дякую!
Thank you!

19. Questions?
Feel free to reach out to me at i@mahaniok.com