Loom, a P9 Family member, recently revealed that it has secured $130 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion, making it the newest member of the P9 Unicorn Club. This club has been a touch crowded in the last few months, with Mambu, Chainalysis, Clio, Westwing, and now Loom all joining this wonderful sub-group of the P9 Family.
Loom has taken the P9 Family unicorn count to nine, which is an excellent excuse to brag a wonderful occasion for some reflection and celebration.
When Pawel and I first started investing, we never imagined to invest in so many firms that would eventually be valued at $1 billion or more. Seriously. This isn't some kind of humblebrag, we're-so-humbled, fishing-for-compliments VC BS. If an entrepreneur had told us in 2008, "I want to develop a billion-dollar firm," we would have probably said, "Yeah, dream on."
To our defence, keep in mind that StudiVZ's €85 million sale to Holtzbrinck and Brands4Friends' €150 million acquisition by eBay were the greatest exits in Germany at the time. In other European countries, the situation was similar. There was Skype (bought by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion), but it was thought to be a once-in-a-decade anomaly. We reasoned that “betting on unicorns" would be far too hazardous. We anticipated that it would take hundreds of seed investments to find a unicorn.
One of the things we appreciated about B2B SaaS was that the consequences are less binary as compared to consumer Internet companies. We reasoned that if we could achieve a few exits in the €200–300 million range (about the best-case scenario we anticipated for most investments), along with a few smaller exits and not too many losses, we'd be able to earn a good return on our €40 million fund. ¹
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We gradually digested the power law dynamic of venture capital returns, but even in 2015, we were still saying we were “hunting for dragons, hoping for unicorns,” because unicorns were supposed to be a very rare animal. Seeing so many of our startup investments develop to tremendous scale has made us lot more daring, and we owe that to the founders of firms like Chainalysis, Clio, Delivery Hero, Loom, Mambu, Tier, Revolut, Westwing, and Zendesk.
When you start a new business, you may feel as though the odds are stacked against you (and statistically they are)
- Creating a unicorn firm necessitates an almost superhuman degree of dedication. You must be obsessed with achievement. You're most likely an animal of some kind. In other words, you must be slightly insane. But, hasn't there always been a delicate line between creativity and insanity?
This is for those who have defied the odds. They are the underdogs. The dark horses who turned into unicorns:
PS: To all the other members of the P9 Family — the Soonicorns and Maybecorns. Today is the day to honour our current unicorns. Your day will come as well! :-)
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