What the duck's a unichicken?!
Well, glad you asked. This cute and comical piece of artwork has a serious message.
Let's start with the chicken. Startups are like factory farmed chickens: we force feed them with
investment capital so they can grow plump and juicy until the moment of liquidation,
at which point the financial value is pulled out of them and we're left with a dysfunctional
carcass of a company.
Then there's the unicorn. The whole idea with these startup chickens is that we're supposed to turn
them into unicorns. In reality, however, 90% of unicorns are bleeding cash and never reach profitability.
What's more, "unicorn" is actually a fancy way of saying "pension fund subsidised monopoly
forming"—which has a number of detrimental effects on the economy. In the United States, ~65% of
investment into Venture Capital funds comes from pension funds. So these cash-bleeding companies are
spending the retirement money of taxpayers. Plus, it's very difficult for companies that rely on
customer revenue to compete with (aspirant) "unicorns", which can endlessly bleed cash and still survive
on the market. This deforms entire industries, causing them to evolve illogically and incorrectly.
Unichicken questions both the hyper-growth model of startup incubation as well as our endless
pursuit of unicorns.
The unichicken design is Creative Commons! Download and use it for your own t-shirts, stickers,
and other merch.
Find out more about non-extractive finance, Post Growth Entrepreneurship, and how business can be
reframed as a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression.
