A Millicorn in Everyone’s Future

In the startup world a unicorn is a private company that has raised a round valuing it above a billion dollars. The name came from rarity: seeing one was about as likely as seeing the animal. They are less rare now, and the reasons have little to do with the companies themselves. The dollar has inflated away part of its own value. Several sectors need enormous capital before they can put anything at all in front of a customer. Public markets have raised both the bar and the cost of floating a company, so fewer companies list, and those that do arrive later, having stayed private through rounds that an earlier generation would have raised on an exchange.

Above the unicorn sits the decacorn, valued above ten billion, and two private companies are now approaching a trillion. Anthropic closed a Series H in May at a post-money valuation of 965 billion dollars, and OpenAI closed its own round in March at 852 billion. If a unicorn is a billion, then a thousand unicorns make a trillion, which by the ISO multipliers gives us a kilocorn. A megacorn would be a quadrillion dollars, and nobody is anywhere near that. At least not yet: but that is for another post.

Since agentic AI became widely usable, a story has been circulating: a solo founder, with the right tools, can now build a unicorn. I think that story is misguided, and I think it should be replaced.

The tools are real and the value they create is real. My objection is to the target. Telling millions of people to aim at a unicorn replicates the Silicon Valley mythology that celebrates extreme sacrifice up to and including self-immolation, and the rarity of unicorns is the measure of what that costs. New instruments let far more people attempt the same climb, but still one in a million succeeding, with real rates probably still lower. That makes a good film. It cannot be a recipe for the kind of balanced life most people are entitled to want.

So I asked myself what these tools mean, given that their power is genuine while the admiration around them is misplaced, and I arrived at the concept of the millicorn.

A millicorn is not a thousand unicorns. It is one thousandth of one. It is a private project, and project is the better word because business is too narrow and it is definitely not a startup, which would be valued at a million dollars if anyone bothered to value it.

A million dollars is a round number and a serious one. In many parts of the world it is a great deal of money. In a few places it has stopped being so, which says more about those places than about the number. Valuation can be expressed in many ways, and Silicon Valley has produced some absurd multipliers over the years, but a stable one is a single times revenue. Generate a million dollars a year at a decent margin, ten or twenty percent, and the project is valued at about a million dollars.

The question I care about is whether that number is within reach of practically anyone who has a computer or a phone. Consider what getting there takes: analysing the opportunity, designing the business model, naming and branding it, choosing the go-to-market strategies, designing and testing the product or the service, working with suppliers, setting up the commerce plumbing that delivers it, and supporting the customers who buy it. Every one of those functions can now be performed by agentic AI, or strongly supported by it. One person can be surrounded by an army of competent collaborators, which until recently was the privilege of a funded company.

Multiply a million dollars by the eight billion people on the planet and the total comes to eight quadrillion dollars, against a world economy of about 126 trillion this year. That is some sixty times everything the species currently produces, and in the multipliers of a few paragraphs ago it is eight megacorns. I put the figure forward as an aspiration. A target of that size says the ceiling is not what constrains this. The constraint is how many people believe the attempt belongs to them. None of it demands a radical change in how we think about the future either, because applying the AI that already exists to the processes and businesses that already exist raises well-being measurably.

Remember, and this is worth repeating: the economy is not a zero sum game. When we create value, it is not because we stole it from someone else. The simplest way to illustrate this is looking at places that were uninhabited or uninhabitable before, poor and scarcely populated, and are now bright centers of economic activity. Deserts or malaria infested swamps, now rich cities and empowered peoples.

The obstacle in the way is cultural. For decades our sense of what a young company should do has been shaped by a perverse incentive. Investors need startups to pursue improbable goals, because only a large enough multiplier on the few that work can cover the losses on the many that do not. That arithmetic is sound for a fund and punishing for a founder. It requires startups to live in a permanent state of imbalance and fear. Raise money, fail to spend it quickly enough, and the question comes back: why did I give it to you? Holding it against a downturn is the wrong answer. Go out, take market share, run out of money, raise the next round, and if the next round never comes, other startups will succeed in your place.

A millicorn sits under none of that pressure. It does not need to become large enough for anyone to earn a fund’s returns on it. It will probably never take outside investment at all. It might take a thousand-dollar loan from an uncle, or a small grant from a foundation, and then grow organically on the strength of the agents doing the work.

A business that grows organically and needs nobody’s money already has a name in investor circles, and the name is delivered with condescension: a lifestyle business. The phrase implies the thing is unworthy of the passion its founders bring to it, for the single reason that it does not require anyone’s capital. It is sour grapes, and what it says is that a business cannot be any good if it does not need my money.

If the millicorn becomes common, several habits will have to change. We will pursue many more local projects. One of the standard accusations against a founder today is that the problem is real but local, with no path to global scale. Solving a local problem well, and inspiring a million other people to solve theirs, is an excellent outcome by any measure that counts the people involved. An ecosystem will grow around it, with incubators and accelerators and consultants and advisors. And most of them will themselves be AIs.

We assume that more of us will take on an entrepreneurial posture once the instruments are cheap. Many people, though, legitimately value security above the rewards of a risk they would rather not take. It also shifts with life stage, because the risk someone would have accepted ten years ago is not the one they will accept with a mortgage and two children. The most useful version of this may be the calculated risk taken inside an existing job, by someone with no technical background who builds a working tool for their colleagues and discovers that they can. I have watched that happen, and it changes what the person believes about themselves more than it changes their employer.

There is also the objection that all of this will look the same. AI-generated content is repetitive, the argument goes, and a wave of AI-built projects will flood the world with near-identical sites and near-identical copy. Part of that is true and temporary. The ages of AI accumulate in ever-shortening cycles: there was a period when every generated image was neon lit and futuristic, and the current period is beige and earth-toned with a little orange. Those are fashions in a machine’s taste and they will pass as fashions do. What stays distinct is the problem each project picks and the person who picked it. Anyone who has produced work with these tools has primed themselves to spot the tools in the work of others, and that recognition can be met with sympathy as easily as with scorn.

I want everyone to have a millicorn, to reap the benefits of the technology that puts one within reach, and to meet the next wave of these tools with enthusiasm.