Start-up 'monomyths'

Book review of The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths That Hold Back Start-Ups, Founders And Investors

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick covers a lot of ground in this slim monograph. He cites 150-odd studies of the start-up space to debunk myths, or “monomyths” as he describes them, that have built up around unicorns.

Monomyths (a term coined by the late Joseph Campbell) are myths that perpetrate across cultures. It is usually applied to the study of similar themes in creation stories, fairytales and the like but it is apposite in this context. The book’s thesis is that founders look at famously successful start-ups —Facebook, Uber, Google, Twitter, even Microsoft and Apple from a bygone era —and attempt to