The Internet is for UnicornPrn

How the pursuit of bloated valuations became a full-time job… and a part-time identity crisis.

UnicornPrn

Melissa Kwan

, and

Lloyed Lobo

Mar 13, 2025

🎧 Listen on → 🍎 Apple Podcasts 🎵 Spotify ▶️ YouTube 📡 RSS Feed

👋 Welcome to Episode 1 of UnicornPrn, the no-BS startup podcast and newsletter where Melissa Kwan and Lloyed Lobo rip the glossy sheen off startup life and expose the gritty, brutal, and occasionally hilarious truth behind the unicorn chase.

If you’re new here, grab a drink. You’ll need it.

This week, we’re breaking down the biggest, most dangerous lie in tech—that building a billion-dollar startup is the only kind of success that matters.

UnicornPrn is what happens when founders chase billion-dollar dreams at the cost of their health, relationships, and sanity… only to realize too late that they were just pawns in someone else’s game.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

✅ The origins of unicorn obsession and our own founder delusions
✅ Why raising money ≠ success (but sure feels like it)
✅ The survivorship bias that convinces people they’re just one check away from their big break
✅ The math of ownership—and why most funded founders end up broke
✅ A real-talk framework for deciding if VC funding is actually right for you

Let’s get into it.

💸 The Unicorn Delusion: Where It All Began

Once upon a time (2013, to be exact), Aileen Lee at Cowboy Ventures coined the term unicorn… a rare, mythical startup that hit a $1B valuation.

At the time, it was meant to describe something almost impossible, a company that grew at an insane pace. But Silicon Valley heard “unicorn” and thought:

“Yeah, let’s make this the new bar for success.”

Fast forward to 2020, and nearly two unicorns were minted every day.

2003-2013: Finding a unicorn was like spotting Bigfoot
2015: 50 unicorns—startups go crazy trying to be one
2021: 1,200+ unicorns, mostly overvalued and burning cash
2023: More unicorns dying than being created. Oops.

Somewhere along the way, being a unicorn stopped being rare and started being expected.

“Founders didn’t start companies to solve problems. They started them to become unicorns. And that’s when things got stupid.”

🎭 The Performance Art of Fundraising

The biggest scam in startups?

Raising money feels like success.

The moment you close a funding round, TechCrunch blasts your name. Your peers treat you like you made it. VCs nod approvingly at parties. You might even be asked to speak at a conference.

But here’s what no one tells you:

🚨 The moment you take money, the game changes.

You’re no longer optimizing for profitability—you’re optimizing for your next raise.
You don’t control your own destiny—you serve your investors first.
Your new full-time job? Fundraising. Forever.

One founder put it perfectly:

“I took the first check thinking it would give me freedom. Instead, I spent the next five years on an 18-month treadmill, trying to keep the funding alive.”

The worst part? VCs don’t even hide this.

Their whole game is to generate an OUTSIZED return for their investors (Limited Partners = LPs). The only way to do that? Force startups to grow, raise, and either exit HUGE or die trying.

“Once you’re on the VC train, you don’t get off until you IPO or crash.”

🧮 The Math That No One Does (Until It’s Too Late)

Let’s talk ownership—or rather, how little of your company you’ll actually own after raising multiple rounds.

Here’s a real case study:

Series C startup
$75M ARR
Raised $90M over multiple rounds
Four founders
Guess how much each founder owns?

5%.

Yes, 5% of their own company.

For each founder to make “FU money” ($30M = UHNW status), they need a $600M exit — and a decade of grind.

Meanwhile, we know dozens of bootstrapped founders who quietly built $20M ARR businesses, sold for $80-100M, and took home the same amount without ever answering to a board.

💸 How the VC Math Actually Works

When you raise VC, you’re not just taking money — you’re selling future ownership.

High Return Targets: VCs aim for 10x–100x returns (3x is the bare minimum) — because most bets flop, and the few winners need to carry the fund.
Risk Premium: Startups are risky as hell. Big wins have to make up for all the losses.
Fund Economics: VCs don’t just invest for fun — they need big outcomes to pay their LPs and raise their next fund.
Dilution is Real: Each round chips away at your stake. And it adds up fast. By Series C or D, you might own a sliver of what you started with.

How it usually plays out:

Seed: 10-20% dilution
Series A: 20–25% dilution
Series B: another 15–20%
Series C: more dilution

📉 Every Raise = Higher Exit Target, Higher Risk

You raise at a $10M valuation, and a $50M exit can change your life — but VC math doesn’t like that.
You raise at a $100M valuation… you need a $1B outcome just to make the math work.
You raise at $300M… you're playing the IPO-or-bust game — and the exit options start shrinking fast.

Most founders don’t do this math. Until it’s too late.

✍️ So Ask Yourself This:

Are you optimizing for wealth or just playing status games?

Because the truth is, you don’t need a unicorn to build a rich, fulfilling, freedom-first company. But if you play the unicorn game, you’d better know the odds — and the price.

🚂 Funding Choice Is a Lifestyle Choice

Most founders think of funding as a business decision. It’s not.

It’s a lifestyle decision.

Raising money means:

❌ You now answer to people who don’t care about your personal life
❌ Your company is no longer just a business—it’s an investment vehicle
❌ The next decade of your life is locked into the growth train

“Your funding choice dictates how you live your life. Choose wisely.”

A VC-backed founder’s life vs. a bootstrapped founder’s life:

It’s not VC = evil / Bootstrap = noble, it’s just a fundamentally different operating system, and founders often underestimate the tradeoffs VC brings until they’re knee-deep in it.

🔥 The Unicorn Industrial Complex: A Vicious Cycle

So why do founders keep falling for it?

Because the system is designed to make them believe it’s the only way:

🔹 Media glorifies unicorns—but rarely covers the 95% of VC-funded startups that fail.
🔹 Investors push for growth—because it drives higher valuations, which improves fund performance even before an exit happens.
🔹 Other founders flex funding rounds—so new founders think that’s the goal.

The result?

🚨 Founders making bad decisions to look successful instead of being successful.

One founder put it best:

“I thought raising money meant I was winning. Turns out, it just meant I was really good at storytelling.”

🎯 So… Should You Raise Money?

Here’s how to decide in 30 seconds:

✅ YES, raise VC if:

You’re building a company with truly venture-scale potential (massive growing market, rapid scalability, high margin, low incremental cost, $1B+ exit potential).
You’re willing to optimize for hypergrowth over profit for the next 5–10 years.
You’re okay with reporting to a board and ceding strategic control when needed.
You’re comfortable making tradeoffs between long-term ownership and short-term acceleration.
You genuinely want to move fast, hire big, and raise often — and can handle the pressure that comes with it.

🚫 NO, don’t raise if:

You want to retain ownership, stay profitable, and make decisions based on customer needs, your own values, and the kind of life you actually want to live — not hypergrowth.
You value freedom, autonomy, and control over external capital.
You want to build at your own pace without boardroom-driven urgency.
You don’t want your calendar consumed by fundraising cycles and investor optics.

🔍 Real Talk: Here’s what’s not venture-scale (and still totally awesome):

A profitable SaaS tool that maxes out at $10M ARR serving a niche.
A DTC brand with great margins but no path to massive scale.
A boutique services business that prints cash but doesn’t scale without headcount.
An agency with 70% retention and $3M profit.

If you only take one thing from this:

The right way to build a company is the way that works for you. Not what TechCrunch says.

🧠 Melissa & Lloyed’s Lessons from Chasing the Unicorn Dream

"UnicornPrn doesn't just hijack your business — it hijacks your identity."

This isn’t theory. It’s not a motivational quote. It’s real-life founder therapy — straight from two people who’ve lived both sides of the startup myth and came out with scar tissue and clarity.

💥 Lloyed’s Story: The Unicorn Chase That Almost Killed Him

Lloyed Lobo is the founder story you’re supposed to aspire to: co-founder of Boast.AI, which he helped bootstrap from the ground up to eight-figure revenue. Before becoming a founder, he spent years working for various early stage venture-backed startups, learning how the game is really played. Boast later raised a large growth equity round — and Lloyed and his co-founder were able to take life changing money off the table in the process. On paper, he checked every box on the traditional startup success checklist.

Except one: surviving it.

What you don’t see after the funding round are the tradeoffs:

Burning 18-hour days to hit growth targets.
Endlessly justifying decisions to a boardroom full of people who never met a customer.
Managing expectations from the team, investors, customers, and family — while slowly losing himself.
Replacing founder fire with big company fluff.

Then came the real punchline:

After the funding round and finally pocketing some hard-earned cash, Lloyed booked the dream family vacation to Bora Bora — the reward for all those years of grind.

But he never made it.

Instead, he landed in the ICU with COVID-induced bilateral pneumonia, gasping through oxygen tubes, unsure if he’d make it out alive.

“I spent years chasing this unicorn dream. We got the funding to scale, the TechCrunch article, the status — and in the end, I was too sick to enjoy it. That’s when it hit me: I’d built a business that broke me.”

What no one tells you:

🏴‍☠️ You can scale a company and lose everything that matters.
🏴‍☠️ You can hit $10M ARR and feel hollow inside.
🏴‍☠️ You can chase a valuation on paper and a funeral playlist in your back pocket.

That moment reshaped everything for him. He started rebuilding his life around sanity, health, and freedom-first entrepreneurship.

His new mantra?

“Life and business are a marathon not a sprint. Nurture what helps you play the long game... Health and family will matter long after the headlines stop.”

🔥 Melissa’s Story: Freedom Over Funding, Every Time

Melissa Kwan didn’t raise venture capital.

Not because she couldn’t — but because she didn’t want to. Because she saw what it did to her peers: the treadmill, the burnout, the performative growth, the constant compromise.

But that wasn’t always her stance.

There was a time when she thought maybe she should raise.

She built the deck. Practiced the pitch. Tried to sell a vision big enough to attract a term sheet.

“The problem was… I didn’t believe my own story. I was pitching for funding, not building for customers.”

Then something strange happened.

While trying to raise, she accidentally built a profitable company. Revenue started coming in. Growth was real. Customers were happy. And suddenly, she had what most founders chase funding for — without ever raising a cent.

And with that came a clarity most never find:

She didn’t want to scale a team just to grow a valuation.
She didn’t want board meetings dictating product strategy.
She didn’t want to raise money just to prove she belonged.

“People told me I couldn’t build something meaningful without funding. Then I realized — that was never my goal anyway.”

Melissa’s blueprint is the anti-hustle playbook:

✅ Build something you believe in
✅ Design for freedom, not optics
✅ Stay profitable, stay nimble, stay sovereign

While her peers were running on investor deadlines and fake GTM roadmaps, she was designing a life she actually wanted to live.

Her philosophy is sharp:

“If your company owns you, you’re not an entrepreneur — you’re an employee with more anxiety and fewer benefits.”

💡 Their Hard-Earned Truths

Together, their journeys explode the startup myth from the inside out. Here’s what they’ve learned after chasing (and rejecting) the unicorn dream:

Venture capital isn’t evil. It’s just not for everyone.
Most founders raise money to feel legitimate — not because they need it.
Chasing valuation is a game that can cost you your health, relationships, and identity.
Ownership isn’t just equity — it’s agency.
The real flex isn’t a Series B. It’s being able to walk away whenever you want.

Melissa and Lloyed aren’t saying don’t raise money.

They’re saying: know what you’re buying when you sell equity.

Because every dollar raised comes with a trade:

Autonomy → Oversight
Pace → Pressure
Vision → VCs’ KPIs
Peace → Deadlines

And if you’re not clear about those tradeoffs, you’ll wake up 5 years in, wondering whose company you’re actually running.

Lloyed’s hot take:

“Your funding choice is a lifestyle choice. It’s not just cap table math — it’s how you spend your life.”

And Melissa’s mic-drop:

“Think you’re the player, but don’t know the rules? You’re the entertainment.”

This is the stuff nobody tells you at Demo Day. But this is what founders need to hear before signing that first term sheet.