I'm not the op and this is the first time I've seen someone else use the term, but I've used it too. Aspirationally - small and impossible to kill. While a unicorn's goal might be growth at all costs (with associated high chance of failure), our goal is to survive anything that might get thrown our way.
Look into the early history of Airbnb. They did anything to survive - even selling politician-themed breakfast cereal. Yes. pg exclaimed, you guys are like cockroaches, you just won't die.
Don't know if that's the origin, but hey it could be. Without the story, calling someone "cockroach" has unclear sentiments.
Hard to kill because they're financially independent. We believe enough in the technology we're building (gpu-powered graph ai & visualization) and the missions we're powering (security, fraud, anti-misinfo, healthcare, etc.) that we turned down large initial funding as it would have broken us. So awhile back, being cockroaches meant running as cost-effectively as we could (and still do, in fact, just not as extreme) as we figured it out, and now that things are working, it means prioritizing sustainable growth vs financial games likely to fail.
In contrast, popular models prone to failure and largely fueled by market phenomena like low inflation rates include ad-based social media ("we'll turn on revenue in 5 years, no, really!"), blitzscaling ("we'll eventually figure it out!"), sales-driven growth ("our federal team will make our $ back in 3-5 years, no really!"), acquihires ("with enough AI talent we'll just sell our staff!").
I like venture capital, such as for deep tech and true growth, but the reality is most tech VC funding is more about financial engineering that assumes most of the portfolio fails. They push for commercial scaling too early and wipe out, which is fine for the rich VC who just needs 1-3 bets to win. Fine for them, but sucks for most founders & employees unless they job hop every 2 years. If we take VC $ again, it'd be on our terms and with a clear payback/growth return.
A great way to kill an otherwise great idea & company is putting VC $ in, which puts a company on overdrive and financially implodes before it has a chance to figure things out. They're addicted and likely can't stop relying on VC without layoffs (or less likely, succeeding), at which point many of the A players leave as well and hard to recover. Instead, if a cockroach raises > $2M (so commercialization phase), that should generate enough sales revenue that they can keep organically growing in 18-24mo later even if a follow-on round doesn't happen. You'll hear such cockroach founders saying they don't even touch the money for months. Numbers-wise, most Series A companies fizzle out, which is because of this unicorn-or-bust structure.. and especially whenever the market is not on a bull tear. With a bit more time, they probably could have figured it out... but they blew it.
