Unicorns, in Silicon Valley, tend to be conceived accidentally. Take, for example, an app called Cicada, established with the admirable purpose of hosting three-to-five minute videos on a wide range of educational topics that might supplement the schooling of the teenagers it saw as its audience. Quickly, though, the start-up’s founders — Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang — spotted a slight hitch.
Nobody wanted to watch educational videos. On any subject. What they wanted to do, it turned out, was lip sync to bubblegum pop.
So Zhu and Yang pivoted. They renamed their app Musical.ly.
They later rebranded it again, and conquered the world with TikTok. Advertisement As the author Taylor Lorenz noted in her book Extremely Online, many of the billion-dollar start-ups that have come to dominate our lives boast equally unlikely genealogies. YouTube was initially a dating site.
Twitter grew from the ashes of Odeo, an abortive podcasting app, and was conceived as a way of telling your friends when you were having dinner. Facebook set out to assess whether people were hot or, alas, not. They both just turned out to also be good at influencing elections.
It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, then, that in a few years’ time, millions of people will happily open the streaming platform Unify blissfully unaware that it was, when it first launched, supposed to be a European Super League. Actually, maybe that is unfair. Maybe Unify will end up as a hyper-realistic AI companion tha.
