Solo Unicorns
This is the second essay in my “500 words for 5 days” series. It was much harder to write than I expected. I assumed I had all the thoughts clear in my head and would just type them out, but I was wrong. I apologize if it’s not entirely clear. I’ll come back to edit it later. Feedback welcome.
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I work in tech and venture capital, so I’m naturally excited by the potential of technology. Also, a trained investor, I’m constantly evaluating how capital-efficient and strategically positioned founders are. But despite these two things, I find the glorification of AI-powered solo unicorns, one-person one-billion-dollar companies, strange.
In early April, everyone celebrated the first one-person billion-dollar company, Medvi. Sam Altman wanted to meet the founder. It’s very impressive, and I applaud that founder. But I don’t like how it was quickly adopted and pitched by AI CEOs as the pinnacle of what people can do now that AI will take our white-collar jobs. It is presented as a radical leverage and individuals reclaiming agency. We will have millions of people selling millions of products to millions of people. It might signify abundance, freedom, or choice. But most likely it’s just a promotion of universal hustle. It seems to me like an acceleration of more of the same, not of human flourishing. This vision works for a few, but it can’t be a serious, major alternative to employment as AI companies propose.
The reason the “solo unicorn” glorification is irritating is that it exposes how the market captured and infiltrated all desires*, but having done so, seems unable to envision anything beyond its own infinite replication. It’s running out of creative ideas, and we need to fix that.
One of Silicon Valley’s genuine achievements has been to fuse compelling visions (curiosity, world-building, freedom, exploration, even transcendence) with capitalist form. The lineage runs back to the 1960s counterculture, which might have been the alternative, but it lost out and was absorbed and repackaged within tech instead. The early Bay Area technologists fused libertarian individualism, technological utopianism, and the rejection of traditional institutions. That fusion proved enormously useful. So, beginning in the 1970s, stable lifelong employment and hierarchical corporations gave way to flexibility, individual self-management, and aesthetics. The new structure attracted rebels and misfits who would never have tolerated a Fordist world, perfectly captured in Apple’s first ad mocking IBM. Those people went on to build some of the largest companies today.
So the problem isn’t that those companies have captured our desires. It’s that we have framed all desire in capitalist forms. And now that the most important AI CEO is pitching us a very boring desire, we are accepting it. After breaking through massive technological bottlenecks, is this really the best we can imagine for people? This is a flat horizon that reveals capitalism may have run out of desires to pitch to us. Where do we look to find better desires to chase? The other visions of the world we have historically proposed suppress our desire. Nothing built on the suppression of desire sustains itself. Other visions lack desire altogether. Heaven, by all reports from my ancestors who have made it there, is boring. Utopia is desirable as a concept, but the way we pitch it today means we won’t have desire once we get there. And our civilization and history have been built on our desire for change, our desire for more. Desire is not just about lack; it’s also a creative, productive force, and we need that.
How to navigate through the current capitalist framework to carry these massive technological gains toward a more expansive vision of human flourishing?
Footnote:
*Mark Fisher calls this capitalist realism, not just an economic system but a foreclosure of the imagination, in which capitalism comes to feel like the only possible horizon for what a human being could want. In this case, when we are asked to picture its best possible future, the answer comes back: more companies, more markets.
I wonder if an abundance of things sometimes creates a poverty of meaning?
Human beings do seem to live happier(?) and more meaningful lives with achievable goals which require some (but not too much) struggle, connected to basic needs. No-one wants to be down the bottom of Maslow's pyramid, but progress and abundance do seem to have overshot us in the other direction in some ways. The idea of an abundance of hustle and entrepreneurship, highly-leveraged individuals... it doesn't sound very appealing.
I like the idea of better desires! I wonder which cultures have the best desires?