Not Every Business Needs to Be a Unicorn
Somewhere along the way, we decided that every business should become enormous. Raise money. Grow fast. Hire aggressively. Open an office. Raise more money. Grow faster. Then eventually become a unicorn. But what if you don't want that?
What if you want to build a business that makes a great living? One that gives you freedom. One that employs ten brilliant people instead of a thousand average ones. One that lets you take your kids to school. One that you actually enjoy running.
Is that somehow less ambitious?
I don't think so.
There are millions of businesses quietly creating enormous value without ever appearing on a startup ranking.
A great restaurant. A brilliant design studio. A specialist consultancy. A family business. A software company with twenty employees and excellent margins.
They're not failures because they aren't unicorns.
They're businesses.
And maybe we've confused scale with success.
I think we've also created a strange hierarchy around entrepreneurship. The founder raising £20 million is somehow celebrated as more ambitious than the person building a £2 million business with ten people, healthy margins and a life they actually enjoy.
Why?
The number of zeros in the valuation doesn't tell you whether you've built something meaningful.
VillageAF is interested in the founder who wants to build something meaningful, whether that's a lifestyle business or something that eventually becomes enormous.
The destination doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
The important thing is that the founder gets to choose it.
Because a business should serve the life you're trying to build.
Not the other way around.